Pin Assignments in Quartus

Written by Nathan Liesch of Imperium Accelero 9000 W'03

This is just a quick suggestion of how to speed up the process of assigning pins in Quartus. While individual pins can be assigned by selecting Assign Pins from the Assignments menu this is often a tedious process if you have numerous signals that are connected off-chip. To hasten the process one can manually edit the your_project_name.csf file in a text editor. The format of each pin assignment is:

signal_name : LOCATION = Pin_pin_number;
signal_name : IO_STANDARD = io_standard;
signal_name : SIGNALPROBE_ENABLE = OFF;

For example the signal clock is assigned to the pin L6:

clock : LOCATION = Pin_L6;
clock : IO_STANDARD = LVTTL;
clock : SIGNALPROBE_ENABLE = OFF;

Simply add all of your pin assignments within the section CHIP(project_name) { ... } and save the file. Now if your pin assignments have worked properly when you check the Assign Pins screen and scroll to your pins they should have a signal name beside them.

Written by Nathan Liesch of Imperium Accelero 9000

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