DDR SDRAM

Hi all,
I'm designing an FPGA based board. I needed to add DDR-SDRAM. Is there
a way to interface the SDRAM to the FPGA other than develop/buy a
controller to put inside the FPGA? I mean: are there external DDR-SDRAM
controllers?

Cheers

taileb.mehdi@gmail.com wrote:

> controller to put inside the FPGA? I mean: are there external DDR-SDRAM
> controllers?

Sure, every PC motherboard chipset contains one. But it's less work
just to integrate a controller into your FPGA design.

taileb.mehdi@gmail.com wrote:
> Hi all,
> I'm designing an FPGA based board. I needed to add DDR-SDRAM. Is there
> a way to interface the SDRAM to the FPGA other than develop/buy a
> controller to put inside the FPGA? I mean: are there external DDR-SDRAM
> controllers?
> 
> Cheers
> 

I'd think the idea of a DDR controller is...strange. It's like you're
saying the DDR interface itself is non-optimal, some other interface
would be better.

You'll still have to interface with this *other* interface. How is
performance? Seems like most DDR controllers that you can
plug in would just have the effect of converting a DDR into a slow
SRAM. Whoopie. DDR shines when you can do big burst accesses
and when you're not switching between rows, you can get
fantastic bandwidth out of them. Any controller would just
abstract that away and you'd lose performance.

-Dave