AR# 1104: MAKEBITS TIE--Should all designs be tied?
AR# 1104
MAKEBITS TIE--Should all designs be tied?
Description
Keywords: makebits tie recommendation
Urgency: standard
General Description: The question often comes up as to what Xilinx's official position is as far as the tying of designs. Some considerations are listed below.
Solution
The main reasons for tying a design are to reduce power consumption caused by floating internal nets, and to reduce sensitivity of the programmed device to noise. The MakeBits tie option defines all unused CLB and IOB inputs and consumes all available interconnect. This guarantees that all unused resources are at a known, non-floating logic level.
Tying a design is generally recommended for production designs. On the other hand, it is not critical to tie a design during the debugging stage of the design process unless it is a power-critical application. Skipping the tie operation during debug can save processing time.
The general rule is: tie production designs whenever possible to reduce power consumption and internal noise.
It should be noted that it may not always be possible to tie down a design due to a lack of resources or routing congestion. From a functionality standpoint, tying the design may also not be desirable if the delay associated with tying unused interconnect to certain signals slows them down to unacceptable levels. The solution in such cases is to tell Makebits to avoid using certain nets for Tie by marking them as Critical before the Makebits -t is run.
Note also that tie remains an all-or-nothing process in Makebits--that is, if it is not possible to tie off *all* unused interconnect, *none* of the unused interconnect will be tied. This applies to all versions of Makebits up to v5.2.1.