AN 866: Mitigating and Debugging Single Event Upsets in Intel® Quartus® Prime Standard Edition

ID 683869
Date 9/28/2021
Public
Document Table of Contents

1.2.1. Configuring RAM to Enable ECC

To enable ECC, configure the RAM as a 2-port RAM with independent read and write addresses. Using this feature does not reduce the available logic.

Although the ECC checking function results in some additional output delay, the hard ECC has a much higher fMAX compared with an equivalent soft ECC block implemented in general logic. Additionally, you can pipeline the hard IP in the M20K block by configuring the ECC-enabled RAM to use an output register at the corrected data output port. This implementation increases performance and adds latency.

For devices without dedicated circuitry, you can implement ECC by instantiating the ALTECC IP core, which performs ECC generation and checking functions.
Memory Storage and ECC