Altera Quartus II 4.2 SP1 fit problem and Altera APEX20KE clock problem

Mar 03, 2005 3 Replies

I'm using an Altera APEX20KE with 200k gates on a bought FPGA board. The Clocks 1 and 2 of the FPGA are used by the board, the Clocks 3 and 4 are free. I testet the i2c-core from opencores.org working with the onboard clock on Clock-Pin 2 and it works fine. If I connect (just connect not use in the FPGA, I'm still using the onboard clock from Clock-Pin 2) an own clock to the two free Clock-Pins, the i2c-core doesn't work anymore !!! :-( If I use my own clock on Clock-Pin 3 or 4 as clock-input for the i2c-core, it doesn't work too. I can't understand this behaviour !?!?!?



If I put in the Altera Megafunction altclklock at the input of Clock2 and Clock4 Quartus II 4.2 SP1 can't fit. The Error Messages of the Fitter are: Error: Project requires too many 2 ClockLock PLLs, but the selected device can contain only 0 ClockLock PLLs Error: Project requires 2 signals of type clock output, but the target device can contain only 1 signals Error: Can't fit design in device Error: Quartus II Fitter was unsuccessful. 3 errors, 0 warnings but the APEX20KE: EP20K200EFC672-3 has 2 PLLs according to the data sheet!!!! Is this an Error in Quartus or mine???



Please Help



Manfred Balik


Hi Manfred, I'm not familiar with Apex too much but I know on Stratix certain PLL can ONLY be instatiated with certain dedicated clock pins, ie. the PLL # has to match the clock pin, otherwise a no-fit occurs. I suspect this is your problem. Check the Apex docs, or swap the clock pins that feed your PLLs.

HTH, Pete

Hi Manfred,

The EP20K200Exxx-1X and -2X have proper PLLs, the others don't. All the bigger 20KEs have PLLs, but in the non-X version these haven't been tested and might therefore be defective.

If this is a recently-produced device and doesn't push the edge of performance of the -3, you might want to classify it as a -2X and see how well you fare in practice, but don't try this if you're going to actually produce something with a -3 posing as a -2X.

Best regards,

Ben

I'm using the right clock pins (if I understand the data sheet correct)! ... and this is the behaviour I don't understand :-( Manfred

"Peter Sommerfeld" schrieb im Newsbeitrag news: snipped-for-privacy@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...

Join the Discussion

Have something to add? Share your thoughts — no account required.

Didn't find your answer?

Ask the community — no account required