Executive Summary
Soft memories are nothing but memory made up of flip flops. These are very easy to code and very versatile to use from a design perspective. If a designer wants to make a 570 bit memory instead of instantiating a 1k ( assuming this is the smallest sram size available) sram and using only 512 bits of sram he can just create a fifo using flip flops. This way he economizes on power while using existing libraries.
Even though soft memories or fifo make life easy for the rtf designer it may create issues in different stages of the PD flow under specific circumstances. We will discuss these issues in detail and we will see how this can be handled at the PD end.
