Altium Designer FPGA pin swapping setup?

[JohnG300c]

I'm working on an 8-layer PCB design where an Altera Arria II GX is hooked up to a DDR2 SO-DIMM. I'm using Altium Designer Summer 09. Due to the large number of signals and layers I would like to set up my PCB project to use the pin swapping and FPGA/PCB pin synchronization feature built into Altium Designer.

I have read all related PDFs and online documentation so I know that I should create an FPGA project that contains the top-level ports. The ports should be named the same as the signals on the PCB. I then create a constraint file containing the initial pin assignments. After pin-swapping, I update the synchronization via ECOs and the "FPGA Workspace Map dialog"

I'm having big trouble setting things up to make this FPGA/PCB synchronization working. Some of the initial problems are (not limited to the below but I'll bring these issues up for starters):

1) My custom Arria II GX symbol/footprint is not recognized as an FPGA by Altium Designer so the FPGA Workspace Map shows 'No FPGAs in PCB Document'. I created my own symbol and footprint in my own schematic and PCB libraries. Must I create an integrated library or do something else for the 'PCB to FPGA Wizard' to recognize my FPGA component as an FPGA?

2) When trying to fan out my FPGA footprint in the PCB editor nothing is fanned out but a dialog shows up saying that "the FPGA is already fanned out".

3) How should a custom FPGA not supported in Altium Designer be integrated such that FPGA/PCB synchronization will work properly? I came across the 'NexusDeviceID' FPGA schematics symbol parameter that supposedly would make AD understand that the symbol is an FPGA but adding it didn't make any difference.

In general, I understand how the pin swapping is supposed to work but I'm having trouble getting started. I would greatly appreciate if someone could give me some useful pointers in the right direction :grin:

 

[Sckoarn]

Did you have to use a Custom symbol? Is there a standard symbol you can use? If there is a stardard symbol, can you see how it is defined?

I would try and use a standard symbol if there is one, and see if you can get the pin swapping to work.

 

[FvM]

I noticed, that Arria II GX isn't yet supported by an Altium library. But you should study how the existing FPGA libraries support pin swapping. There must be a detailed definition of swappable pins respectively pin pairs. In a real design, the choice of swappable pins depends on many details, e.g. selected bank voltage and I/O standard. Also the constraints set by the usage of other pins, and e.g. pin distance rules must be considered. It's not clear to me how it's achieved with one general library in Altium designer.

When I used pin swapping with other layout tools, I defined a specialized library based on the respective design enviroment. But I have only basic knowledge of Altium, I didn't use it yet for designs with FPGA.

 

[JohnG300c]

Apparently, Altium uses an internal database to keep track of the FPGAs that can be used with Altium Designer. It appears it is not possible to create a new FPGA schematic symbol/footprint from scratch that can be used as a "full" FPGA component for purposes of FPGA/PCB synchronization. I was able to "trick" A.D. into partially handle PCB pin swap synchronization by creating a parameter named NexusDeviceID in my custom schematic FPGA symbol and then setting this parameter to a value equal to one of the existing Altium-provided FPGAs. I chose to set the value to that used by the closest Arria GX FPGA library part provided by Altium ("EP1AGX20CF780C6"). This made the FPGA to show up in the 'FPGA Workspace Map' dialog BUT I'm unable to synchronize between the PCB domain to the FPGA domain. Nor am I able to create the 'link' between the FPGA project and PCB project via drag-and-drop as described in the Altium PDFs.

Since i'm not using Altium Designer for my FPGA project I will try to live with the above described limited functionality. I'm hoping that I'll be able to handle the pin-swapping as for any other part. I will then have to manually transfer the final pin assignments into my FPGA project (Altera Quartus II).

Perhaps Altium will release support for Arria II GX in version 10 (supposedly out in January).