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I just took the Quartus II Timing Designer classes, and learned that the output of the timing & fitting process is somewhat indeterminate. I'm not sure that is a problem, but I want to know which of the output files I need to save in order to remove that indeterminacy.
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It should not be indeterminate, i.e., resynthesizing with exactly the same starting seed should yield the same results. However, if you read the PDF on the Qsys PCIe link I posted, some versions of Quartus do "something" that results in a different result.
The main thing you want in your designs is proper TimeQuest constraints so that timing is either met or not. If your design has trouble meeting timing, then rather than saving the one working version, you'd be better off figuring out what was causing the timing issue and fixing it. Using multiple tool versions sometimes helps expose a change in timing. Ultimately your code should be insensitive to the tool version.
Cheers,
Dave
Honored Contributor
