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Altera_Forum
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14 years ago

Faster: reg mem[] or M9K?

I'm not meeting timing on my design. It takes over 8ns to pull data out of a 'reg' based 128 deep mem[] (see attached Timequest report). I'm considering ways to speed things up and use of M9K blocks ...
Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
14 years ago

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Will use of M9K RAM blocks significantly speed up the design compared to storing data in regular registers (i.e. 'reg')?

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The huge mux chain involved with a register based memory array will considerably slow down the data access. Block RAM is faster in this situation.

RAM inference coding "style" reflects primarly hardware requirements. The first point to find out is if the intended design topology is implementable with block RAM or can be modified accordingly.