External Memory Interfaces Arria® 10 FPGA IP User Guide

ID 683106
Date 4/01/2024
Public
Document Table of Contents

5.2. Simulation Walkthrough

Simulation is a good way to determine the latency of your system. However, the latency reflected in simulation may be different than the latency found on the board because functional simulation does not take into account board trace delays and different process, voltage, and temperature scenarios.

For a given design on a given board, the latency found may differ by one clock cycle (for full-rate designs) or two clock cycles (for half-rate designs) upon resetting the board. Different boards can also show different latencies even with the same design.

The Arria® 10 EMIF IP supports functional simulation only. Functional simulation is supported at the RTL level after generating a post-fit functional simulation netlist. The post-fit netlist for designs that contain Arria® 10 EMIF IP is a hybrid of the gate level (for FPGA core) and RTL level (for the external memory interface IP). You should validate the functional operation of your design using RTL simulation, and the timing of your design using timing analysis.

To perform functional simulation for an Arria® 10 EMIF IP design example, locate the design example files in the design example directory.

You can use the IP functional simulation model with any supported VHDL or Verilog HDL simulator.

After you have generated the memory IP, you can locate multiple file sets for various supported simulations in the sim/ed_sim subdirectory. For more information about the EMIF simulation design example, refer to the Arria® 10 External Memory Interfaces IP Design Example User Guide .