Accelerator Functional Unit Developer’s Guide for Intel® FPGA Programmable Acceleration Card

ID 683129
Date 7/20/2020
Public
Document Table of Contents

5.3.2.2.5. Generating an AF Build Environment for Source Development

The OPAE SDK design flows for AFU development shown in this guide apply exactly as shown if the AFU design description is all RTL. However, if you want to design all or a portion of your AFU with Platform Designer subsystems or IP variants or want to add in-system debug components to the AFU design, it is helpful to generate an AF build environment for use in developing the AFU design description.

First, configure the build environment with a build configuration file as specified in the section Generate the AF Build Environment. The build configuration file is a text file that, at a minimum, consists of a single line that references the AFU’s platform configuration file (.json). The file reference can be absolute or relative to the directory where the build configuration file resides.

Then, generate an AF build environment with the following command from an open terminal window:
afu_synth_setup –-source \

<path-to-build-configuration-file>/<build-configuration-filename> build_synth

cd build_synth/build

quartus dcp.qpf

Once the Intel® Quartus® Prime Pro Edition GUI opens, open the dcp.qpf project file and use the revisions feature to create a new revision based on the afu_synth revision and give it a unique name (e.g., afu_dev). Use the newly created revision as a workspace to develop the AFU’s design description with tools such as Platform Designer or to add debug instances with tools such as Signal Tap. This method enables AFU design description development with high level, GUI-based tools in Quartus Prime Pro without corrupting the PR compilation revisions provided by the OPAE SDK for generating an AF.