Memory initialization


alex

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I was reading through Jim Wu's FPGA blog and came across something that in HidsightTM is one of those "D'oh I should have done that!" moments but because I've seen it done a certain way before, I kept doing it the same way over and over.

 

Suppose you need a ROM that contains a repeatable waveform such as for example a sine or cosine wave. How do you do it? I used to generate the data in Excel then copy the numbers into a ROM initialization section. I know, right? Shameful!

 

Here's a better way according to Jim, generate that stuff on the fly in an initialization function:

constant MEM_DEPTH : integer := 2**ADDR_WIDTH;type mem_type is array (0 to MEM_DEPTH-1) of signed(DATA_WIDTH-1 downto 0);function init_mem return mem_type is    constant SCALE : real := 2**(real(DATA_WIDTH-2));    constant STEP  : real := 1.0/real(MEM_DEPTH);    variable temp_mem : mem_type;begin    for i in 0 to MEM_DEPTH-1 loop        temp_mem(i) := to_signed(integer(cos(2.0*MATH_PI*real(i)*STEP)*SCALE), DATA_WIDTH);    end loop;    return temp_mem;end;constant mem : mem_type := init_mem;

The advantage of this is that if you need to shrink/expand the number of values in the table or adjust the number of bits in each value, you don't have to re-generate all the table data, just tweak the initialization function accordingly. Full example source code on his site.

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