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roboknave's avatar
roboknave
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2 years ago

Trying to recompile sim libraries for MAX 10 under quartus 21.1

I saw another question, essentially the same question but different hardware, relating to recompiling the sim libraries to perform simulation. Anytime you recompile these libraries, it reaches down ...
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kadenaron's avatar
kadenaron
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2 years ago

Hi,

We are currently facing the same problem.

We are trying to simulate the Triple speed Ethernet IP (TSE).

The compilation fails with the "Macro '<protected> is undefined" message for all encrypted files.

The operating system is RHEL 7.9.

Older versions of questa are able to compile the encrypted file without error:

  • Questa v10.2d -> compilation without error
  • Questa v10.6C -> fail to compile the encrypted files
  • Questa v2023.2 -> fail to compile the encrypted files

It seems that starting from a certain version, Questa is not able to compile the encrypted files.

I've noticed that the keyname used to encrypt the file is "MGC-DVT-MTI", the key_method is "rsa" and the data method is "aes128-cbc".

In the Questa documentation, it is written that for version 2023.2, the MGC-DVT-MTI and MGC-VERIF-SIM-RSA keys are deprecated. Maybe this is related to the impossibility to compile encrypted files which use the MGC-DVT-MTI key?

We use exactly the same script for the 3 version of the simulators.

Without changing anything but the tool version, the compilation with Questa 10.2d succeed and the compilation with version 10.6C and 2023.2 fails. We have tried all language compatibility flags on the VLOG command line but that did not help.

We need to use newer version of the simulator than version 10.2d and we currently can't because we are not able to compile the Ethernet IP. Any help would be welcomed.

Thanks.

  • roboknave's avatar
    roboknave
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    2 years ago

    I hope you find an answer. You might look in your logs and see if you can find when it is running vlog. I suspect, on any version of linux, vlog doesn't seem to know how to process protected IP. That is what I found on Ubuntu. I'm not sure that would be different on RHEL. I'm not sure why it is the case, but maybe replacing just the one vlog binary, from the older package that works, into the newer version of Questa that doesn't, might help here. Not really sure. I suspect, if it is as you state above, the newer Questa not supporting the kind of license/crypto protecting the IP, and you needed new IP wrapped in the CORRECT crypto, then it might be a long time coming from Intel. As it is, while this thread hasn't necro'd that far yet, I suspect you might also have better luck with a new thread in the same vein as this thread because based on a previous reply, I don't think Intel folks are even paying attention to this thread anymore because I mentioned the dreaded "unsupported platform". Not that Intel has to support every old thing Altera had out there, but the MAX10 is still in their "recommended for current designs" list (good at least for my case) and they did SOME work in the past to support Quartus in Linux. So I was kind of hoping for a bit more support when I asked this, but it appears to be a bridge too far.

    Anyway, good luck with this.

    PS: As I noted above, the Windows version of the software DOES seem to work fine. Running vlog in the Windows version still supports the crypto. Maybe it didn't get any update? Not sure. In any case, using Windows might actually help you.