Pin Planner - by board wire?

Hi Martin,

Eventually you will find that you do not use the GUI, eg. if you are rebuilding a project, you just want to do "one thing". In my case, that one thing is to run a synthesis script.

Given that the pin assignments and functions on a board, such as your evaluation board never change, I find it more convenient to define a top-level entity description with the pins named per the board design (or slightly modified if I don't like the names used on the schematic). I then create a pin assignments Tcl script to create the pin assignments in the .qsf file.

A design that targets a specific evaluation board is then wired into the top-level entity. For example, lets take the BeMicro board with a Cyclone III FPGA and the BeMicro-SDK board with a Cyclone IV, here's a couple of layers of my hierarchy;

boards/bemicro/cyclone3/share/scripts/pinout.tcl  Pin assignments script
boards/bemicro/cyclone3/basic/src/bemicro.vhd    "Basic" top-level design
boards/bemicro/cyclone3/basic/scripts/synth.tcl  Synthesis script
boards/bemicro/cyclone3/avalon/src/bemicro.vhd    "Avalon" top-level design
boards/bemicro/cyclone3/avalon/test/bemicro.vhd   Testbench
boards/bemicro/cyclone3/avalon/scripts/synth.tcl  Synthesis script
boards/bemicro/cyclone3/avalon/scripts/sim.tcl    Simulation script
  
boards/bemicro_sdk/cyclone4/share/scripts/constraints.tcl  Pin assignments and constraints script
boards/bemicro_sdk/cyclone4/basic/src/bemicro.vhd    "Basic" top-level design
boards/bemicro_sdk/cyclone4/basic/scripts/synth.tcl  Synthesis script

Every board is created with a "basic" design. That design just blinks an LED, or wires a push-button to an LED, something "basic" :) But more importantly, it drives every output or bidirectional output with a sane value; usually to a deasserted value, or asserted if its a reset control to say an external PHY. This ensures that everything on the board is put into a sane state, no matter what.

I can then copy-and-paste that reference design as the top-level design for any new designs. Again, any unused interfaces get left at their sane defaults.

If you want example code/scripts, let me know, and I'll post it.

What development board do you have?

Cheers,

Dave