Altera Pins.txt File
- Bill OLeary
Like Xilinx, Altera provides a full text file to describe the pins of their FPGAs. Each FPGA Family of parts such as the Stratix IV, Stratix V, Arrria 10 has a slightly different format. The Text file is available for download on the Altera website. Altera has a text file for each Fpga Device in the family and each file contains a section with the complete pinout for all the supported package sizes for that part. For instance Figure 11 below shows 2 snippets of the Arria10 10AX115 Device the first shows the start of the pin information for the F1152A package and the second shows the F1932B package. The 10AX115 part file actually describes all 6 different valid package configurations that the 10AX115 supports.
When building an Altera part, PartBuilder needs to be told the filename to read and the appropriate package to find within the pins.txt file. PartBuilder uses the Pins.txt file in both the Physical and Logical flow for an Altera Part.
Figure 11:Altera Pins.txt file For Arria10 10AX115 Part Highlighting 2 different packages