Saturday, September 1, 2012

Libero SOC and IO constraints

A rule that I have always kept to is : Keep design source files as text! A  while back I had the misfortune of using ATEasy. Back then all ATEasy projects were binary, and the sources were stored in the project. This made it very hard to compare versions or to store the sources in revision control. This was bad back then. Even then, ATEasy became aware of the problem and added an option to store project files as text.
Getting back to Microsemi / Actel... The newest version of the tool no longer allows out to use a PDC file to store IO constraints. You must maintain the constraints from within Designer. This is unpleasant to say the least. The constraints are held in the Designer project file. The project file is not only binary, but it is updated on every run.
You can of course import a PDC file, but don't try and change the IOs around without first opening the tool to unassign all IOs from the Designer database. Otherwise you'll get errors about conflicting IO assignments.
Please fix this!

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