Performing Equivalent Timing Analysis Between Altera TimeQuest and Xilinx Trace

Most hardware designers who are qualifying FPGA performance normally run software benchmark comparisons of FPGAs from different vendors to determine which vendor provides the largest margin for their timing requirements. To produce equivalent or fair performance comparisons, designers must consider that different software tools have different default timing analysis and optimization behaviors. Altera's Quartus II TimeQuest timing analyzer generally calculates all possible register-to-register and complex clock structures using the most conservative assumptions by default. In contrast, Xilinx's Trace timing analyzer does not analyze many of these complex structures as extensively, so comparing the software tools on this basis unfairly penalizes Quartus II performance.