Optimizing Pin Queries - 2024.1 English

Vivado Design Suite User Guide: Using Constraints (UG903)

Document ID
UG903
Release Date
2024-06-15
Version
2024.1 English

Because there are several times mores pins than cells in the design, using get_pins instead of get_cells can have a significant impact on the runtime. The runtime degradation can be experienced when processing XDC constraints (for example, open_checkpoint runtime) or when executing a Tcl script. AMD recommends leveraging the relationship between pin and cell objects to improve the runtime for large number of pin queries.

Instead of finding a list of pins based on their names among all pins in the design, it is more efficient to first find the cells of the desired pins, and then refine the query by filtering the desired pins of the cells returned by the first query, as described below.

Recommended Pin Queries

  • Original pin query:
    get_pins –hier * -filter {NAME=~xx*/yy*}
  • Recommended efficient pin query:
    get_pins –filter {REF_PIN_NAME=~yy*} –of [get_cells –hier xx*]
  • Alternate recommended pin query:
    get_pins –filter {REF_PIN_NAME=~yy*} –of [get_cells –hier * -filter {NAME=~xx*}]

Example

For example, consider the following constraint:

set_max_delay 15 -from [get_pins -hier -filter {NAME=~*/aclk_dpram_reg*/*/CLK}] \
-to [get_cells -hier -filter {NAME=~*/bclk_dout_reg*}] \
-datapath_only

The constraint above can be re-written as follows to significantly improve the query runtime, especially for larger designs:

set_max_delay 15 -from [get_pins -of [get_cells -hier –filter
{NAME =~ *aclk_dpram_reg*/*}] -filter {REF_PIN_NAME == CLK}] \
-to [get_cells -hier bclk_dout_reg*] \
-datapath_only