SODIMM FMC module

[tuskiomi]

Hello. I'm looking for additional memory for my FPGA board. I looked at the schematic for the FMC on the Genesys 2 board, and found that it has enough IO to support a DDR/DDR2 SODIMM slot. Are there any products out there which can expand volatile memory through the FMC connectors? Any volatile memory is ok, but one for DDR or DDR2 RAM chips is preferred.

[OvidiuD]

Hello, @tuskiomi!

We do not recommend volatile memory through FMC as it is not feasible. DDR interfaces are slow when mapping differential routes and groups of FMC signals. In this context we do not have such product. What I'd recommend is a board that has SODIMM, like Genesys ZU

Good luck!

[zygot]

On 4/3/2020 at 1:28 PM, tuskiomi said:

Hello. I'm looking for additional memory for my FPGA board.

I won't disagree, in general,  with the advice from @OvidiuD concerning DDR. Depending on your requirements there might be other options. HyperRam has decent performance if all of your accesses can be burst at the maximum. If you can find them, older SDRAM might also work, depending on the data rates. SDRAM is relatively easy to use compared to higher performance DDR3 or later. Of course, your FMC mezzanine card could have it's own FPGA/DDR combination and use the transceivers or custom LVDS interface to pass data between it and the Genesys2. All of this speculation is highly dependent on your requirements, which you haven't mentioned; so providing a good answer isn't likely, but perhaps it doesn't hurt to throw out a few possibilities to get you thinking.

I can't think of an application where I'd dedicate the sole high performance IO connector to memory.

The cost of developing your own FMC mezzanine card might well make buying a different platform the most cost effective.

[edit] I've transferred data at 42 MB/s to a PC using USB 2.0 and at 350 MB/s using USB 3.0. There's also PCIe where you can stream data a very high rates.