Increasing Productivity With Quartus II Incremental Compilation

Designers are creating FPGAs that continue to increase in logic density and performance, yet their time-to-market pressures are becoming even more demanding. Computing power is not increasing as rapidly to maintain compilation times for synthesis, placement, and routing. For example, the number of logic cells in Altera devices has grown by 35 times and the number of memory bits by over 100 times in the last ten years, yet computing power has grown only 10 times. Larger and higher performance designs in larger FPGAs are leading to longer compilation times. Today's FPGA designers are expressing concerns about compilation times and achieving timing closure that previously were associated only with ASIC designs.