Honored Contributor
Honored ContributorHi,
Please be advised that this is not a Quartus tool fitter issue, rather an issue with the system memory (RAM). FPGA tools are smart enough to know the size of the FPGA the design is being targeted to and also how many resources are available. Moreover, the fitter would never throw an "out-of-memory" error about the EPCQ Flash as it does not know the size of the flash. It is duty of the board designer/vendor to find out the compatible ISP flash sizes for a particular CPLD/FPGA and use it. That said, if the fitter did run of out resources, it would have spat an error like " Can't fit design into FPGA ..." and would also give a description of the total resources available and resources consumed by the design. This error is due to the Quartus tool running out of memory RAM while trying to fit the design into FPGA. PNR and fitter tools require a lot of system resources aka processing power and memory to compile and fit designs of varying complexity into CPLDs/FPGAs. You did mention that the system has 3.4GB of RAM, is this the total amount of system RAM after GPU usage (4GB-128/256MB) or is it the amount of free RAM that is shown in the System resources page (Task Manager)? In either case, that's a lot less RAM that is required for EDA tools to run properly under Windows OS. Windows doesn't manage system RAM as good as Linux and systems with less than 8GB RAM run into EDA tool memory issues and crashes. I would suggest, you check the number of background tasks that are running and close any unnecessary ones before starting the EDA tool. The best bet would be to upgrade the RAM to atleast 8GB for Quartus to run and fit in small to medium sized FPGAs/CPLDs. For larger FPGAs and designs, you will need a minimum of 16GB system RAM. It may have run earlier , but something else may have changed in the SW (OS, other programs, etc) that are eating up more system resources. So that's why the tools has insufficient memory and crashes.
