One of the things I find really annoying with Quartus II is that whenever it gives resource counts, like in the final synthesis report or in the SignalTap configurator, it gives "bits of memory."
The chip has some combination of M512, M4K and MRAM blocks, not "bits of memory." This makes it very hard to determine what actually going on, especially so since I've found it hard to get Quartus to use the
9th bit of M4K blocks, even when it should be possible.
It would be a lot nicer to get the counts of actual physical resources used.
The Memory Bits are provided in the Flow Summary section of the Report File to give a brief design overview, while inside the Report there is much more detailed information. The Fitter Resource Usage Summary section probably gives what you are looking for, breaking out exactly how many M512s, M4Ks and M-RAMs are required. Note that there is a detailed RAM Summary Report in both the Analysis and Synthesis section of the report and the Fitter section. These give the details on each hierarchical block, how many bits they use and how many of each block type are used.
An important note is that the Fitter RAM Summary may show more blocks being used than the user would expect. This is because Quartus can spread the slices of a RAM across multiple blocks if it helps the design's timing. This is a feature, and if the device memory fills up, Quartus will pack them as tightly as possible, but is a cause for some confusion. In the future there will be a message added to the report clarifying this.
The upcoming release of Quartus will contain improvements in the reporting of the memory blocks used as part of the Signal Tap II configuration.
I've got one thing to add to Subroto's posting. The reason you don't know the exact breakdown of blocks before fitting begins is that Quartus is automatically deciding the best way to pack your memory bits into memory blocks. This is a very tricky algorithm to get right (getting good packing, not screwing up performance, etc.) and a few good friends of mine lost half a year of their life to it. But the result is that our users get the benefits of the "TriMatrix" memory in Stratix & Stratix II without having to worry about the details.
That said, you can always force Quartus to use a particular RAM type if you instantiate an altsyncram directly and specify the RAM_BLOCK_TYPE primitive. I believe there is also some sort of assignment you can make in the assignment editor, but I cannot recall the details.
BTW, you should not be having issues with using the 9th bit. Please send me a design example of you are finding that Quartus is not working the way you expect it to.
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