You're reading from FPGA Programming for Beginners Bring your ideas to life by creating hardware designs and electronic circuits with SystemVerilog

Product type Paperback

Published in Mar 2021

Publisher Packt

ISBN-13 9781789805413

Length 368 pages

Edition 1st Edition

Languages

Assembly

Tools

FPGA

Concepts

Embedded Systems

Author (1):

Frank Bruno

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Table of Contents (16) Chapters

Preface

1. Section 1: Introduction to FPGAs and Xilinx Architectures

2. Chapter 1: Introduction to FPGA Architectures and Xilinx Vivado FREE CHAPTER

3. Section 2: Introduction to Verilog RTL Design, Simulation, and Implementation

4. Chapter 2: Combinational Logic

5. Chapter 3: Counting Button Presses

6. Chapter 4: Let's Build a Calculator

7. Chapter 5: FPGA Resources and How to Use Them

8. Chapter 6: Math, Parallelism, and Pipelined Design

9. Section 3: Interfacing with External Components

10. Chapter 7: Introduction to AXI

11. Chapter 8: Lots of Data? MIG and DDR2

12. Chapter 9: A Better Way to Display – VGA

13. Chapter 10: Bringing It All Together

14. Chapter 11: Advanced Topics

15. Other Books You May Enjoy

Project 10 – introducing external memory

Up until now, we've been using internal Block RAM (BRAM) or distributed RAM. These types of memory are very fast. BRAMs can be accessed in a single clock cycle up to the maximum frequency (fmax) of the device given certain constraints. Look up table memories (LUTRAMs) are a little more flexible in that they can be used asynchronously. Both types of memory are very convenient for small storage, lookup tables, fast memory for things such as cache, and if you have enough for a design, keeping costs and complexity down.

There are many external memory types available for use in designs. Looking just at synchronous Dynamic RAMs (DRAMs) that are still available, we can see how the performance has changed with each generation:

Figure 8.1 – External DRAM performance

Looking at the preceding chart, the first question would be what is the performance of the internal BRAM versus the external memory? What are...