[Discuss-gnuradio] USRP2 Block RAMs Requiring Empty Multipliers

[Kyle Pearson]

I'm trying to make some modifications to the FPGA of the USRP2 which
involves using more multipliers and I came across this error during
the Mapping phase of the compile:

ERROR:Place:665 - The design has 31 block-RAM components of which 13 block-RAM
   components require the adjacent multiplier site  to remain empty. This is
   because certain input pins of adjacent block-RAM and multiplier sites share
   routing ressources. In addition, the design has 28 multiplier components.
   Therefore, the design would require a total of 41 multiplier sites on the
   device. The current device has only 40 multiplier sites.

Looking through Xilinx's support and Googling, I've found that the
512x36 BRAM and the multipliers share interconnects, so that you
cannot use both, you either need to use less multipliers, less block
RAMs, or reduce the input width of the BRAMs to 18 bits. I've tried
reducing the number of block RAMs used by changing the RAM_SIZE
parameter in u2_core to 16384 instead of 32768. This reduced the
number of block RAMs, but this did not change the number of block RAMs
that require an empty multiplier.

I'd like to know where the 512x36 BRAMs are that cause this problem
and if anyone has encountered this problem and found a workaround.
I'm currently using rev. 11641 from the 3.2 release branch and
building on Xilinx 9.2i

Thanks,
Kyle