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Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
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13 years ago

Cyclone III internal ROM(ram) speed

Hi

I'm working on a project where I do use the EP3C120F780C7 on the DK-DEV-3C120N board

I need to do many quick look up in a 8bit wide 256 word table in a pipeline design

I have tried to use the LPM_ROM design and also verilog LUT tables (I would prefer the ROM/RAM since I need many tables and want to spare logic elements

Back to my question I want to do this look up in 1 clk. and here I do see the clk speed does have impact on the result from the ROM ... I try to run it at 200Mhz and then some of the data are corupted, If I lower the speeed for eg 50Mhz it does work but I sure want as fast as posible

So what speed can I expect in this chip ?

will ROM be slower that LUT?

Please advise

Wiljan

3 Replies

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    LUTs will probably be a slower. You can only do a 4:1 LUT in a ROM, so muxing them together to build a 256 deep table will be slow. How fast can the memory run? Put in timing constraints and Quartus will tell you. But note that only giving it one clock cycle means the read address registers will be used. You'll then have the access of time of the memory to deal with. I don't know what that is, but let's say it's 4ns. If you could register the output of the ROM, then you'd make 200MHz easily. But without it being registered that means you have something after the ROM, whether it be combinatorial logic, output ports, etc. before it is finally registered again. All of that is going to cut into how fast it runs. So it's not a question of just the ROM, but the ROM plus the rest of the path, which is up to you. (Which is what TimeQuest is for)

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    Besides asking timing analysis for an exact answer, you'll find "Memory Block Performance Specifications" in the device handbook for a first estimation. It suggests that 200 MHz isn't a problem for the RAM blocks as such. I guess that the specifications are assuming registered RAM outputs however.

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    Thank you for good answers

    I will continue testing a bit and might come back