Steve Chamberlin explains his scheme for packing block ROMs full:
It stores nine 8-bit bytes in eight 9-bit words of block RAM, and provides an interface to read the data as if it were an 8-bit memory with a larger depth. Using this method, I’m able to store 1152 bytes of read-only data per block RAM instead of only 1024. The solution relies on the fact that the block RAMs are dual port – you can read from two different addresses simultaneously. Compared with using the same number of block RAMs as a standard 8-bit wide ROM, this solution consumes an extra 54 LUT4
