Introduction

In official documentation of Intel Quartus Prime 18.1 it is stated that:

Intel® Quartus® Prime synthesis supports the following Verilog HDL language standards:

• SystemVerilog-2005 (IEEE Standard 1800-2005)
• SystemVerilog-2009 (IEEE Standard 1800-2009)

It is also stated which sections from the specification are supported and which are not. But as you might expect it is not entirely true.

Of course no one expects a tool to support all language structures and syntax, but amount and severity of non-supported or misinterpreted constructs is staggering.

In this document I would like to express my discontent with Intel Quartus SystemVerilog support and ways to work around the gotchas I stumbled upon while porting PULPissimo SoC system to Quartus.

PULPissimo project originally utilizes Xilinx Vivado suite for synthesis and the design has been synthesized with Synopsys toolchain as well. They don’t really have support for any Altera/Intel products whatsoever.

My goal was to port the code, which synthesized beautifully on Xilinx Vivado, to work on Altera Cyclone V on Terasic DE10-Nano board. To my discontent the toolchain didn’t support the code base, and it reported errors for various unsupported syntax constructs.

To my greater discontent after successful synthesis the design didn’t work, although the same exact code worked like a charm with Xilinx Vivado. This resulted in countless hours spent on trying to get it working. It resulted in loads of patches, which worked around different incompatibilities.

This document is currently work in progress since the porting isn’t finished yet, but the author wanted to make a catalogue of all the little things he stumbled upon for future reference, while working on the code.

I hope that provided examples will make lives easier for those of us, who are porting some SystemVerilog code from for example Xilinx Vivado to Intel Quartus or are working on making vendor-independent code.

Documentation structure

All mentioned projects are submodules of this repo, so that the reader can see the code base and working code. It is divided into <name>-base and <name>-patched repos for easy comparison between project trees.

As pointed in Quartus’ manual, SystemVerilog specification sections will be referenced according to IEEE Std 1800-2009 IEEE Standard for System Verilog Unified Hardware Design, Specification, and Verification Language, which this tool is supposed to support. All unsupported features, which the documentation is claiming to support are indicated in the first paragraph of an issue section as quoted table excerpt.

Then there is an excerpt from IEEE standard specification and list of all points that are not supported in a way the standard states it.

The final section is a simple example with reference to a file with an unsupported structure.

Synthesis errors

Things that cause synthesizer to show error message and fail synthesis. If the error message is relevant it is attached in description as well.

Type parameters (6.20.3)

Quartus documentation

6.20.3	Type parameters	Not supported

Quartus might report it as variety of errors depending on context. The basic one is error 10170 with a comment: Verilog HDL syntax error at near text: “type”; expecting an identifier (“type” is a reserved keyword )..

IEEE standard

A parameter constant can also specify a data type, allowing modules, interfaces or programs to have ports and data objects whose type is set for each instance.

Unsupported features

Quartus documentation indicates that the type parameters are not supported at all. Depending on context it might require different solutions. For example if expected type is plain logic or logic vector it is possible to parametrize the module with vector width, as seen in an example. The same is for other datatypes with defined bit width. Width of data types such as structs can be determined using $bits() function.

Example

Module declaration from common_cells/src/cdc_2phase.sv.

Non-compatible code:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7

module cdc_2phase #(
  parameter type T = logic[31:0]
)(
  ...
  input T src_data_i,
  ...
);

Compatible code:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7

module cdc_2phase #(
  parameter int unsigned T_w = 32
)(
  ...
  input logic [T_w-1:0] src_data_i,
  ...
);

Module instantiation from riscv-dbg/src/dmi_cdc.sv (not yet included in submodules):

Non-compatible code:

1
2
3

cdc_2phase #(.T(dm::dmi_req_t)) i_cdc_req (
  ...
);

Compatible code:

1
2
3

cdc_2phase #(.T_w($bits(dm::dmi_req_t))) i_cdc_req (
  ...
);

Enumerations (6.19)

In general enumerations are supported. There are only some minor quirks in integer value expressions elaborated in Unsupported features section.

Quartus documentation

6.19	Enumerations	Supported

Quartus might report it as error 10355.

IEEE standard

The integer value expressions are evaluated in the context of a cast to the enum base type. Any enumeration encoding value that is outside the representable range of the enum base type shall be an error.

Unsupported features

Integer value expressions are not evaluated in the context of a cast to the enum base type. If no width is given, it is assumed that given value is a 32-bit integer. Solution to this issue is to explicitly state the width of constant to enum base type width.

Example

From riscv-dbg/src/dm_pkg.sv.

Non-compatible code:

1
2
3

typedef enum logic [2:0] {  CmdErrNone, CmdErrBusy, ...,
                            CmdErrorBus, CmdErrorOther = 7
                         } cmderr_e;

Compatible code:

1
2
3

typedef enum logic [2:0] {  CmdErrNone, CmdErrBusy, ...,
                            CmdErrorBus, CmdErrorOther = 3'd7
                         } cmderr_e;

Set membership operator (11.4.13)

Quartus documentation

To Quartus’ credit it is said to be not supported:

11.4.13	Set membership	Not supported

IEEE standard

SystemVerilog supports singular value sets and set membership operators.

Unsupported features

There are three basic cases of set membership:

1. Specific values – if (a inside {b, c}) can be replaced with simple if ((a == b) || (a == c)).
2. Ranges – if (a inside {[b:c]}) can be replaced with simple if ((a >= b) && (a <= c)).
3. Variants thereof – combine both.

Set membership case statement (12.5.4)

Quartus documentation

Since 11.4.13 is not supported it can be easily deduced that 12.5.4 won’t be supported either.

12.4-12.5	Selection statement	Supported (unique/priority supported only on case statements)

IEEE standard

The keyword inside can be used after the parenthesized expression to indicate a set membership (see 11.4.13).

Unsupported features in Quartus

As indicated by Quartus’ documentation entire case inside construct. There is no easy way to support all cases. Here are some possibilities to replace this construct depending on underlying code:

1. No ranges – inside keyword is obviously not required and can be removed.
2. Ranges aligned to whole bits – can be replaced with casez and don’t care values for ranges. For example [3'b000:3'b011] can be converted to 3'b0??.
3. Ranges not aligned to whole bits – can be either replaced with casez with general wildcard for given range and then inside the case further compared, or it can be translated to if ... else if ... construct with ranges, if parallel behaviour is not required (so no unique or parallel keyword).

Rules for determining port kind, data type and direction (23.2.2.3)

In my personal opinion Quartus’ behaviour in this particular case is really good as it acts as a linter reducing chances of mistype.

Quartus documentation

23.2.2	Port declarations	Supported

Quartus might report it as error 10170 with a comment “expecting a direction”.

IEEE standard

For subsequent ports in the port list:

• If the direction, port kind and data type are all omitted, then they shall be inherited from the previous port.

Otherwise:

• If the direction is omitted, it shall be inherited from the previous port.

Unsupported features in Quartus

If the direction is omitted, an error is thrown – use good practice and don’t omit any part of port declaration.

Example

From riscv-dbg/src/dm_top.sv.

Non-compatible code:

1
2
3
4

module dm_top #(...) (
    ...
    input  logic [NrHarts-1:0]    unavailable_i,
    dm::hartinfo_t [NrHarts-1:0]  hartinfo_i,

Compatible code:

1
2
3
4

module dm_top #(...) (
    ...
    input  logic [NrHarts-1:0]           unavailable_i,
    input  dm::hartinfo_t [NrHarts-1:0]  hartinfo_i,

Loop generate constructs (27.4)

Quartus documentation

No reference to section 27.

IEEE standard

A loop generate construct permits a generate block to be instantiated multiple times using syntax that is similar to a for loop statement. The loop index variable shall be declared in a genvar declaration prior to its use in a loop generate scheme. (…)

Generate blocks in loop generate constructs can be named or unnamed (…)

Unsupported features in Quartus

• loop generate itself – must be enclosed in generate ... endgenerate block,
• genvar inside for loop definition – must be declared outside for loop,
• unnamed loop generate blocks – must be named.

Example

From ibex/rtl/ibex_alu.sv.

Non-compatible code:

1
2
3

for (genvar k = 0; k < 32; k++) begin
  assign operand_a_rev[k] = operand_a_i[31-k];
end

Compatible code:

1
2
3
4
5
6

generate
genvar k;
for (k = 0; k < 32; k++) begin : gen_rev_operand_a
  assign operand_a_rev[k] = operand_a_i[31-k];
end
endgenerate

Conditional generate constructs (27.5)

Quartus documentation

No reference to section 27.

Quartus might report it as error 10170.

IEEE standard

The conditional generate constructs, if-generate and case-generate, select at most one generate block from a set of alternative generate blocks based on constant expressions evaluated during elaboration. The selected generate block, if any, is instantiated into the model.

There is no mention of mandatory generate ... endgenerate, although in some examples it is nowhere to be found.

Unsupported features in Quartus

Conditional generate without generate ... endgenerate block – must be enclosed in generate ... endgenerate.

Example

From ibex/ibex_core.sv.

Non-compatible code:

1
2
3
4
5

if (PMPEnable) begin : g_pmp
  ...
end else begin : g_no_pmp
  ...
end

Compatible code:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7

generate
if (PMPEnable) begin : g_pmp
  ...
end else begin : g_no_pmp
  ...
end
endgenerate

Double semicolon

It’s not particularly bad thing of Quartus to point out. It could be considered a correctly assessed linter error. Quartus doesn’t like double semicolons at the end of a line.

Quartus might report it as error 10170.

Synthesis gotchas

Things that don’t cause synthesizer to show error message, but they synthesize in unexpected way.

case defaults sometimes not working

Ways of verifying which parts of code don’t synthesize

When starting to port code after successfully fixing all errors as described in Synthesis errors section you might have some specific block not working properly. To find out what’s wrong you might want to review RTL if it looks OK and, to Quartus’ credit, its RTL Viewer is really functional (although the author finds Vivado’s RTL viewer more informative for code verification).

In this section you can find a few things to be alert about when doing RTL review for unwanted synthesis optimizations.

Unused pins

First thing to do when there is a problem with given instance is to look at its input and output pins. If they are used in code and you can see that in Vivado they are used in RTL (so they are not optimized out in first stage) they should be used in Quartus as well. It’s very simple step, but can save a lot of time while identifying the most obvious problems.

The way to do it is find a problematic instance in either Netlist Navigator or with search functionality and poke at all input pins to see if they drive any logic and if they drive subjectively enough logic in comparison for Vivado RTL.

Filter node sources

If given output node should be driven by some other nodes depending on case, it should be visible in RTL. The hard way is to trace all the wires in full view. The easy way is to right-click on the problematic node and select Filter→Sources (or Shift+S).

This is particularly useful for verifying case statements.