Forum Discussion

Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
15 years ago

Optimize for size

Hello,

I just decided to try to upgrade my 5.1 quartus to 9.0. The problem I encounter is that in 5.1 i compile the project and get the design consisting of 4,800 elements (chip can hold 4,992). Quartus 9.0 generates the design with 11,000 ?!! elements. Is it possible to finetune new qartus to minimize element amount?

3 Replies

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
    Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
    15 years ago

    Go to the hierarchy browser(Project Navigator) in the top-left and look at why it grew in size. There's going to be a specific reason why it grew this big. If I were guessing, something that was synthesizing to RAM is now going into FFs. Perhaps a state-machine grew in size, but not most likely. It's most likely not going to be a generic "everything got bigger because the synthesis" but a specific problem that can be debugged.

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
    Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
    15 years ago

    I've just spent a lot of time trying to generate a little extra room in our design.

    The best place to start in the resouce advisor in Quartus.

    The one setting that produced an amazing 10% area reduction for our design was... 

    global_assignment -name MUX_RESTRUCTURE ON

    Give it a try yopu never know.