Altera Stratix II GX LVDS max speed

I had spoke with Charley Pryor at Altera a few months back and had asked about running a 16-bit data bus into a Stratix II and what sort of speeds we could expext to run it at. He had made the statement that they had designs running in the 1GHz range and that they had some in-house designs running at 2GHz. Looking at the data sheets from Jan.

  1. they show the LVDS only being rated to 840 Mbps. Interesting enough I am having a hard time finding any designs where people have used the Altera parts at these speeds.

I am curious if any of you have run any wide busses into a Stratix II near the rated speed and what results you had. Did you use the Altera synthisis tool? Was there any hidden problems to get the design to work? Any information would be helpful. Thanks

Reply to
lecroy7200
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My design has two FPGAs each with 10 input and 10 output SERDES channels running 8:1 @ 100 MHz for 800 Mbps per channel. The two FPGAs are both Stratix II devices (2S30 and 2S60) on the same circuit board ~1 inch apart. So adding it all up I guess that would be 16 Gbps going back and forth. Since the connection was physically so short and on the same circuit board it was darn near the ideal setting for running high speed signals.

For the most part everything worked just fine, my only gotcha was that the relationship between when a particular bit comes out and the clock is not defined on the receiver side (although to me looking at the spec it certainly seemed to be to be). This required adding in some code to get the receivers 'bit aligned' properly. The good thing was that I was able to find this really early on in simulation long before I had a board. See the 'Doubt about SERDES' thread from 3/31 for more on that. Other than that it all seems to be working.

I used Quartus 4.x and 5.x with no problems related to SERDES.

KJ

Reply to
KJ

Hi,

According to the link (1) below, Stratix II LVDS I/Os are rated at 1.04 Gbps. If you look at link (2) below, we show some nice eye diagrams at

1.0 Gbps. And that's not Stratix II GX.

Stratix II GX is shipping now, and its clock-data recovery (CDR) I/Os are operating beautifully at 6.375 Gbps and 3.125 Gbps. See link (3) for some characterization results. In addition, SII GX will operate at

1 Gbps just like Stratix II (4).

Referenced links: (1)

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(2)
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(3)
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(4)
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Regards,

Paul Leventis Altera Corp.

Reply to
Paul Leventis

If I wanted to just run a single clock and 16 synchronous data lines into a Stratix device is there no way to make this work? All the information I am finding uses the SERDES. I am interested in seeing something more like Xilinx and National were demonstrating last month with the Virtex but with a Stratix device.

Reply to
lecroy7200

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Reply to
Mike Treseler

Hi,

You'll need to deserialize (via a SERDES) since you can't operate the FPGA core at 1 Ghz. You still need only provide the device your 1 clock and 16 data lines, and the SERDES does the rest. You can also use dynamic phase alignmnet circuitry (DPA) if you want, but you don't have to. In its simplest form, all the SERDES block does in this case is deserialize the data stream by between a factor of 2 and 10 to slow it down to a rate you can handle in the core.

Regards,

Paul

Reply to
Paul Leventis

Talking with the local apps. eng. it sounds like the speeds may be more in the 2-300MHz range. Time to do some reading....

Reply to
lecroy7200

It appears that the Stratix II is not going to be fast enough for the first stage. The primary problem is the lack of being able to support a synchronous parallel bus. Looking in the October 2005 Stratix II GX handbook, the fastest reference clock appears to be 622MHz, far below where I want to run at. I could run a slower clock, use the SERDES to multiply it up and resync the data and expand it out as you suggest, but this really does not make a lot of sense. The clock already has phase noise under 5pS rms (from testing) and the data would be matched going to the device. I tried the SERDES approach you mentioned with the Quartus tools using the Stratix II as a target device (even though we have a full license for Quartus the tool requires TalkBack spyware when targeting a GX device) and it seems to work. I tried to set the clock to the frequency I am interested in and the tool barks back with an error. I then tried a very simple approach of just using clocked register but no luck.

I have seen a few Virtex 4 designs now that directly run a parallel bus at the speeds I am interested in. I am a bit gun shy after all the problems we have seen with Xilinx over the years, but they seem to be a better fit for this application.

If you have any other ideas, I would be interested in hearing them.

Reply to
lecroy7200

You might want to take a look at the Lattice SC device its PURESPEED IO has 2 Gbps throughput per differential I/O pair.

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Reply to
chrisawest

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