Memory Interfaces Made Easy with Xilinx FPGAs and the Memory Interface Generator

As FPGA designers strive to achieve higher performance while meeting critical timing margins, the memory interface design is a consistently difficult and time-consuming challenge. Xilinx FPGAs provide I/O blocks and logic resources that make the interface design easier and more reliable. Nonetheless, the I/O blocks, along with extra logic, must be configured, verified, implemented and properly connected to the rest of the FPGA by the designer in the source RTL code, carefully simulated, and then verified in hardware to ensure a reliable memory interface system. This white paper discusses the various memory interface controller design challenges and Xilinx solutions. It also describes how to use the Xilinx software tools and hardware-verified reference designs to build a complete memory interface solution for your own application, from low-cost DDR SDRAM applications to higher-performance interfaces like the 667 Mb/s DDR2 SDRAMs.