Quartus Prime Design Software

A powerful, integrated design environment built to scale with your FPGA designs. From design entry and synthesis to optimization, verification, and simulation, Quartus® Prime supports every step of development—enabling advanced performance on devices with millions of logic elements.

WHAT'S NEW

What's New in Version 25.1

Enhancements

  • Performance Boost in Nios V/g core.
  • 8% Area Reduction with Nios V/c core.
  • Ashling RiscFree VS Code Extension - Develop with Nios® V in VS Code.
  • TinylML Example Design - Add machine learning to FPGA designs.
  • Linux Reference Designs - Standard and regular editions for Linux development.
  • Xen Hypervisor Support - Run virtualized FPGA applications.
  • RTOS Support - Zephyr and Bare Metal are now supported, FreeRTOS coming soon.
  • Installer Improvements - Faster, more flexible setup with parallel installation and dynamic component selection to reduce setup time and optimize disk space.
  • Streaming Debug - High-speed hardware debugging with efficient real-time data transfer, configurable via Signal Tap (STP).
  • Quartus Prime Pro 25.1 - Introduces native Altera AXI4 Bus Functional Models (BFMs) for improved simulation performance and easy integration, enabling a seamless transition with minimal changes.
  • Improved Transceiver Protocol IP Simulation - Enhanced support for protocols like PCIe, Ethernet, Serial Lite, and JESD, with beta models for Ethernet and PCIe in 25.1and up to 50% faster simulation and verification.

Agilex Device Support

  • Added support for Agilex™ 3 FPGA C-Series.
  • Additional support for Agilex™ 5 FPGA devices.
  • Additional device support for Agilex™ 7 FPGAs F, I, and M-Series.

Other Features and Improvements

  • Containerized Images for Quartus Prime Design Suite (QPDS): Available from Docker Hub for easier deployment and cloud compatibility.
  • Static Timing Analysis Improvements - Smarter design closure with clearer failure categorization, a new summary separating Timing and Design Assistant results, support for relative SDC file paths to improve portability, and fine-grain MTBP controls via toggle rate tuning.
  • RAM Inference Improvements - Enhanced synthesis support including automatic inference of simple quad-port RAM and full support for byte-enable configurations (5, 8, 9, and 10 bits), enabling precise control to write individual bytes within a word.
  • Enhanced the node-finder search filters to include various interface types for faster search queries.

Device and Development Platform Support

  • Agilex™ 3 Beta Support
  • Generate Inference IP from FPGA AI Suite using Agilex™ 5 as the target device in the arch config file.
  • Example design support on Agilex™ 5 FPGA E-Series 065B Modular Development Kit.
  • SOC example design with ARM as host.
  • Hostless JTAG-attach example design.
  • Support limited to 2 years of Quartus Prime Pro releases.

FPGA AI Suite Features and Improvements

  • New layout transform integrated with AI inference IP – supports folding and run-time configurability.
  • Performance estimator takes user’s input of available external memory bandwidth.
  • Previously performance estimator assumed memory bandwidth which could not be adjusted by the user.
  • Useful for users designing for smaller devices like Agilex 5/3 which could have limited memory bandwidth.
  • FPGA AI Suite 25.1 moves to OpenVINO 2024.6.

AI Models, Tooling, and Branding Updates

  • YoloV7 model support.
  • Identifies and locates objects within an image or video with high accuracy and speed. Used in Industrial quality control, surveillance, robotics etc.
  • Altera Rebranding.
  • RPM and DEB packages are now “altera-fpga-ai-suite-”.
  • AI Suite now installs into ‘/opt/altera’ instead of ‘/opt/intel’."

Introducing Agilex™ 3 IPs

  • Flexible I/O support with high-voltage, high-speed interfaces - MIPI D-PHY, 1.25 Gbps LVDS.
  • Robust data-transfer capabilities - 12.5Gbps transceivers, PCIe 3.0, and 10GE + 1GE low-latency MAC hard IPs.
  • Manage data transfers between non-contiguous memory locations without CPU overhead using sSGDMA IP.
  • High-speed, low-latency data transfer for varied applications using SerialLite IV.
  • Precise timing synchronization across network devices with TSE–1588 support.
  • Cost-effective memory support with LPDDR4 up to 2133Mbps.
  • Seamless integration with ARM Cortex processors using HPS EMIF.
  • Robust synchronization features for multiple data converters using 12.5Gbps JESD204B.
  • Comprehensive debugging and testing of transceiver links using the Transceiver Toolkit.
  • High-resolution image and video processing using Video and Vision Processing (VVP) IP suite.

Agilex™ 5 IP Updates

  • Introducing LTPI: The next-gen protocol for DC-SCM 2.0, offering higher bandwidth and scalability for seamless low-speed signal tunneling.
  • Real-time adjustments of multiple configurations using Dynamic Reconfiguration - PMA-D.
  • Multi-Channel Direct Memory Access (MCDMA) for PCIe 3.0/4.0 x2/x4 supporting both RP and EP.
  • Deterministic low-latency communication with Ethernet TSN @ 10M/100M/1/2.5 G + SGMI.
  • Interlaken @ 12.5Gbps per serial lane introduced in Agilex 5 D Series.
  • JESD204B up to 17.16Gbps with UTK support.
  • JESD204C protocol included in Dual-Simplex mode.

Downloads

Quartus Prime

Pro Edition

Advanced design flow, block-based design, interface planner, partial reconfiguration, and high-speed transceiver support

Quartus Prime

Standard Edition

Broad legacy support, platform designer, partial reconfiguration, and core timing/power tools

Quartus Prime

Lite Edition

Free access, essential design tools, basic compile flow, Signal Tap, and starter simulation

Features

Platform Designer

Platform Designer is a system integration tool in the Quartus® Prime Software that automatically generates interconnect logic to connect intellectual property (IP) functions and subsystems, saving significant time and effort in the FPGA design process.

Block-Based Design

Design, implement, and verify core or periphery blocks once, and then reuse those blocks multiple times across different projects that use the same device.

Partial Reconfiguration

Reconfigure a portion of the FPGA dynamically while the remaining FPGA design continues to function. ​

Design Partition Planner

A design partition is a logical, named, hierarchical boundary that you can assign to an instance in your design. Defining a design partition allows you to optimize and lock down the compilation results for individual blocks.

Chip Planner

Chip Planner simplifies floorplanning by allowing you to view and constrain design logic within a visual display of the FPGA chip resources. You can use the Chip Planner to view and modify the logic placement, connections, and routing paths after running the Fitter.

Interface Planner

The Interface Planner explores a device’s peripheral architecture and efficiently assigns interfaces. The Interface Planner prevents illegal pin assignments by performing fitter and legality checks in real-time.

Logic Lock Regions

A Logic Lock region is a powerful type of logic placement and routing constraint. You can define any arbitrary region of physical resources on the target device as a Logic Lock region, and then assign design nodes and other properties to the region.

Multiprocessor Support (Faster Compile Time)

Using multi-processors for compilation can result in faster compile times depending on the number of cores used.

IP Base Suite

Altera provides full production licenses for some of its popular IP cores in the Altera FPGA IP Base Suite, which is free with the Quartus Prime Software and Quartus Prime Pro Edition Software.

Fitter (Place and Route)

The Compiler's Fitter performs design placement and routing. During place and route, the Fitter determines the best placement and routing of logic in the target FPGA device.

Register Retiming

Register Retiming can balance register chains by retiming (moving) ALM registers into Hyper-Registers in the routing fabric.

Timing Analyzer

The Timing Analyzer is a powerful ASIC-style timing analysis tool that validates the timing performance of all logic in your design using an industry-standard constraint, analysis, and reporting methodology.

Design Space Explorer II

The Design Space Explorer II tool allows you to find optimal project settings for resource, performance, or power optimization goals.

Power Analysis

Power analysis features include Early Power Estimators, Altera® FPGA Power and Thermal Calculator, and the Power Analyzer that give you the ability to estimate power consumption.

Signal Tap Logic Analyzer

The Signal Tap logic analyzer captures and displays the real-time signal behavior in an FPGA design allowing you to probe and debug the behavior of internal signals during normal device operation, without requiring extra I/O pins or external lab equipment.

Transceiver Toolkit

Transceiver Toolkit uses System Console technology to help FPGA and board designers validate transceiver link signal integrity in real-time in a system and improve board bring-up time.

Questa*-FPGA Edition Software

Questa*-FPGA software editions are a version of the Siemens EDA Questa* Core software targeted for Altera® FPGAs devices.

Demo Videos

Quartus® Prime Installer (Command Line Mode)

The new Quartus® Prime Installer is a light-weight downloader and installer client that allows users to download various Quartus components such as devices.

Extracting Presets in Quartus® Prime Demo Video

Video detailing how to extract and save board and preset files from an existing known good reference design for a target board that can then be reused to create a different design for the same target board.

Agilex™ 5 E-Series No Cost License

Agilex 5 E-Series device is supported in Quartus Prime Pro 24.1 onwards. Watch this video guide to fetch and enable the device in Quartus software.