How to use Engineering Change Management with the Chip Planner (ECO)

The ECO is not a long-term tool. It is made to make a small change on the back-end that hopefully won't have to be repeated. The main uses are to change I/O standards or phase-shift a PLL to quickly see the effect. Once one is "chosen", the user modifies their PLL or assignments manually. (Note that it's possible to write out a Tcl script based on ECOs, so that they can be "re-done" on the back-end, and though I've done this for some strange cases, it's generally not recommended.)

If you want to hand-place stuff, go to the top right Editing Mode pull-down, and change it from ECO mode to Assignment Mode. This makes .qsf assignments based on your changes. I think it's mainly location assignments, but haven't really played with it much.