Upgrading from QII 9.1 SP2 to QII 14.1

Hi Hua

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Most of our projects are still on QII 9.1 SP2 (with some on QII 11.0), we have been thinking about upgrading them to a newer version of Quartus II. But a few things concerns us:

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Yes, it's better to get to the latest tools, especially, if any changes are planned in the design. please note: Lots of older families have been dropped in the latest versions, so make sure the latest version supports your family before you go forward. (IE Cyclone III's were dropped with 14.0)

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1. SOPC to Qsys flow

I noticed that a lot of things has changed significantly in the project directory and function files. We use SVN to track the changes of projects, all the projects can be reconstructed by script files in the old QII flow. Now if we migrate to newer QII, we will need to rewrite these script files. The first thing is to know those new key function files (.qsf, .tcl, .dcf, .sopcinfo, etc.) and where to find them. does altera has a document describing these things?

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Not only has the SOPC to QSYS flow changed, ALL the SOPC components have changed as well. IE UART's etc. They change with each QII version release. These may or may not be a problem. (I know some components completley changed interfaces and some were obsoleted at different times. I suggest you rebuild your system in QSYS then validate that level before going too far. There was a migration path from SOPC to QSYS, but I found it was better to understand your system, and QSYS to manually rebuild it in QSYS.

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2. Resource usage

About 2 years ago, we looked at the possibility to go this direction, and found the QII 12.x seemed to be less capably in optimizing the resource usage comparing to QII 9.1 SP2, and was unable to fit one of our projects. Has Altera improved this on its newer versions?

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Basically our designs we pretty much skipped from 9.1 SP2 to 13.1. 13.1 seems like a pretty stable release, and still supports Cylcone III.

I'm playing with 14.0/14.1 and have done some small cpld's in these tools As far as your fit/function I know some of the "Default" fit switches have changed, which may or may not cause you design to not fit. You can usually get back to where you where, but it may take some work.

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3. Nios development flow

Is the embedded system development flow kept backward compatible from QII 9.1 to QII 14.1? We understand that there may be some adjustments need to be made to get thing compiled again in QII 14.1, but is it going to be lots of surprises?

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I know the NIOS tools got better from 9.1 to 13.1. I haven't really played with them in 14.1 yet. Thinks have definitly changed along the way. Since I'm mostly in the verilog side, I don't really play much on with the NIOS software tools.

Pete

Thank you for your reply, Pete!

Upgrading to 13.1 is definitely an option for us. Most of the complications seem to come from SOPC to Qsys migration. Upgrading from 13.1 to 14.1 or something newer in the future should be much less work.

Do you use command line scripts for your flow? If you do, do you think the command line tools migration to be smooth?

We do use command line scripts. But we migrated the SOPC system into an ASIC. For the most part it depends what you are doing with your scripts. but once you get the SOPC into the QSYS framework I think you are ok, unless you are building the SOPC system via a script, then it's probably more difficult.

Pete