Altera FPGA users need no introduction to Partition Merge, a step in the Altera Quartus-II (“Quartus”) design compilation process that combines multiple netlists (post-synthesis or post-fit) into a single, complete netlist. Quartus triggers this step automatically whenever it detects any design partitions in a project. Will Quartus always run Partition Merge? If not, why? Quartus […]
Due to the rigorous nature of InTime’s approach, we’d often get comments like, “You mean this takes 100 compilations more than usual?!” An evaluation customer made an interesting comment recently. This time it was, “I need to evaluate InTime more as it met timing too quickly.” It felt like a compliment hidden within a complaint, […]
One of the questions that FPGA designers wonder and sometimes even argue about, is: Should the implementation tools focus on Worst Slack (WS) or Total Negative Slack (TNS)? FPGA tools typically devote more attention to WS, but there are tradeoffs. If WS is small yet many paths fail timing, then TNS can be huge. Similarly, […]
Last month we released InTime v1.2, and we’ve been pushing out a number of incremental updates ever since. While the past few versions have been all about introducing new kick-ass features into InTime, this time we focused on working out the kinks. Here are the highlights of this version. New “Seeded Effort Level Exploration” Recipe […]
Solving timing problems via software tools has always been the exclusive domain of the FPGA vendors. As designers, we are conditioned to run timing analysis, examine timing reports and then close timing by changing RTL and constraints. Occasionally, (favorite tip received so far), I’m told to update the FPGA software to the newest version or […]
We leapfrogged 1.1.6 because we got a ton of requests. So here is InTime version 1.1.7. What are the top 3 features worth checking out? Here’s my list. For a detailed list of changes, please see the release notes. #1 – “The Good, The Bad and the Necessary” — More control over synthesis and […]
InTime v1.1.5 was officially released on Thursday, the 8th of May. This release focused mainly of making it easier for new users to get started, and polishing up existing features. This release also contains numerous bug fixes which were reported, most significantly issues experienced by some users where specific designs failed to run property […]
As we are only starting to make more information about InTime available publicly, there hasn’t been release-oriented posts until now. Going forward we’ll aim to accompany every release with a post highlighting new features as well as adding detailed release notes to the InTime documentation. If you’re not quite sure what InTime is yet, check […]
Early this year, we released InTime under a closed-door early access program to a handful of customers. From the various feedback and feature requests, it is currently undergoing a series of rapid upgrades and improvements. We are excited by the support and insights that InTime is delivering to customers. For the rest of the […]
During InTime development, we got curious about the commonly-held premise that Area and Speed (and correspondingly, timing score) have an inverse relationship. Meaning that if you want more speed, you’d need to sacrifice area and vice versa. So we did tests on many designs to verify this relationship. Basically to obtain the results, we built […]