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ALane's avatar
ALane
Icon for New Contributor rankNew Contributor
7 years ago
Solved

How to Infer a ROM's Contents from a file?

I'm trying to convert a Xilinx design onto a Cyclone V and am struggling with the Intel documentation on how to infer a ROM where its contents are provided by an external mif file​. Looking at the do...
  • Abe's avatar
    Abe
    7 years ago

    You could initialize the memory using MIF file or Intel HEX file. I would suggest you replace your ROM code with one of Intel's 1-port ROM Megafunctions. When you use the megafunctions, there's an option to initialize the memory using MIF or HEX files.

    Migrating the small ROM/RAMs to using Intel megafunctions may help resolving such issues.

    -Abraham

Tricky's avatar
Tricky
Icon for Occasional Contributor rankOccasional Contributor
7 years ago

Unfortunately, Quartus has been lacking the ability to infer the ram contents using textio for years - I raised an enhancement request on this 10 years ago - afaik this is still not possible!!!!

You can use the ram_init_file attribute to read the contents of a .mif file during synthesis, but it wont load it during simulation. The only way to load it during simulation is with an init function (like the one you posted - but this only would need to be removed from synthesis) or by using the altsyncram megafunction and specifying an init_file generic to the .mif file