Designing with FPGAs involves many types of memory, some familiar from other devices, but some that are specific to FPGAs. This post gives a quick overview of the different flavours, together with their strengths and weaknesses, and some sample designs. This guide includes external memory types, such as SRAM and HBM, that are used in CPUs and GPUs, so much of what is said here is generally applicable, but the focus is on FPGAs. Read more

It’s common for a simulation or firmware to need data loading into a memory array, ram, or rom. Fortunately, Verilog provides the $readmemh and $readmemb functions for this very purpose. Unfortunately, there is a dearth of good Verilog documentation online, so using them can be harder than it should be. This article explains the syntax and provides plenty of examples, including how to do this in Xilinx Vivado. If you want to learn more about FPGA memory itself, see FPGA Memory Types. Read more