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Memory is the most common SoC element that requires some manipulation to be FPGA-ready. We will focus now on RAM in particular and consider other types of memory later.
We have seen in section 7.5.5 that RAM can be described behaviorally in RTL and then inferred by FPGA synthesis into the correct FPGA memory elements. Unfortunately, SoC synthesis tools do not handle memory in the same way, and instead they are instantiated as black boxes in the RTL. Various views, such as functional behavior and physical layout, are used to “fill” the black box later in the SoC verification and implementation flows.
These various views of the memory are often automatically created and parameterized by a generator such as the coreConsultant from Synopsys or Custom Touch Memory Compilers from Virage Logic. The SoC team will be familiar with these types of tools and use them to generate very sophisticated memories, optimized for the SoC design. In an ideal world, the FPGA synthesis would recognize the black box as the output from a particular memory generator and automatically replace it with an equivalent FPGA view. However, there are a large number of possible memory configurations, as can be seen in Table 16, and the synthesis would need to infer the functionality of each of them with only the reference of the black box name from external library as a guide.
Maintaining a cross-reference of all possible SoC memories from all possible generators to their closest FPGA equivalent would not be productive and typically yields non-optimal results. Instead we focus on the specific RAMs in the SoC (which will be a small subset of the overall range of possible configurations) and create optimized replacements only for them. Some help can be offered by the memory generator tools and memory IP developers themselves and some do indeed generate FPGA equivalent views for use by prototypers. In an ideal world our SoC team will have chosen their RAM for exactly that reason, but in most cases we need to consider how we can replace an SoC RAM with the FPGA equivalent.
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Product Categories: Embedded - CPLDs (Complex Programmable Logic Devices)
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