Which Altera FPGA is best for memory design?

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I need some guidance for puchasing a proper FPGA that shall meet my purposes.

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You need to describe you "purposes" first. There are many types of memory. You need to describe your requirements more clearly.

Cheers,

Dave

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You need to describe you "purposes" first. There are many types of memory. You need to describe your requirements more clearly.

Cheers,

Dave

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I hope this time I made myself a bit more clear.

:)

In FPGAs you use the ready-made memory blocks. You can configure them in variousways.

Designing from scratch applies to ASIC world. The memory blocks of FPGAs can be viewed as little ASICs inside.

You can design memory functionality from FPGA registers but these are not usually wasted for this purpose. Alternatively you can use ALUTs as distributed memory within FPGA

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My purpose is to design various types of memory with different control mechanisms so I can measure their power and performance. I know there is a built-in memory option in almost any FPGA, but what I need is to build a memory from scratch.

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The problem with this approach is that there is no option to "build a memory from scratch".

You can describe a memory in VHDL or Verilog, and the synthesis tool will implement it using either built-in memory or using logic cells.

If you want to look at performance and power, then you need to use the timing analysis and power analysis tools for a specific test, eg., for power consumption create a design with lots of toggling registers, create a VCD file in Modelsim and then run that through the quartus power analysis tool. For timing analysis, create a design, add timing constraints, and then run a timequest analysis.

Cheers,

Dave