Embedded Processors/Serdes

"=2E..Altera continues to sell Excalibur devices, this product family is not recommended for new designs. Designs requiring embedded processors should consider Altera's Nios=AE II processor.

Excalibur devices integrate a 200-MHz processor with the APEX=99 20KE FPGA architecture, balancing the price, performance, and system integration requirements of system-on-a-programmable-chip (SOPC) designs."

Not sure if this is just research or product development, but you could still get Excalibur devices. Eric

No there isn't anything else on the market or announced. The only FPGAs with hard embedded processors and high speed serial transceivers are from Xilinx.

Virtex-II Pro - PowerPC405 (up to 400 MHz) & Transceivers (up to 3.125 Gbps) Virtex-II ProX - PowerPC405 (up to 400 MHz) & Transceivers (up to 6.250 Gbps) Virtex-4 FX - PowerPC405 (up to 450 MHz) & Transceivers (up to 10.3125 Gbps)

Ed

There is also Tensilica, Stretch and a raft of other mixed hardware-software computing companies (startups) out there that try to combine some FPGA fabric with a processor, but they don't make as much noise as the 2 bigger players. They probably don't have Serdes either.

I don't get the impression the Excalibur/Arm is being further developed, a 1 shot offering for Arm users.

johnjakson at usa ...

If you could live with an external PPC, Lattice and Altera have both a FPGA fabric with Serdes on it. Altera: Startix GX Lattice: ORTx2G5 (Ethernet), ORSOx2G5 (SONET) where x stands for 4 or

8 (# of channels) delivering up to 3.7Gbps Serdes channels with excellent Jitter specs

One suggestion: get away from the on board processor. It kills your SerDes performance.

Luc

You can probably still get the Altera EPXA1, EPXA4 or EPXA10 devices, but they have been mostly erradicated from the Altera web site and they don't want you to use them as you noted above.

Also, these devices don't include a high speed transceiver as the OP wanted.

Ed

You can probably still get the Altera EPXA1, EPXA4 or EPXA10 devices, but they have been mostly eradicated from the Altera web site and they don't want you to use them as you noted above.

Also, these devices don't include a high speed transceiver as the OP wanted.

Ed

By "on board processor" I'm assuming that you mean in-FPGA processor.

I'm not sure where you got the impression that the PowerPC in the Virtex family effects the operation of the SerDes/MGTs, but this is not accurate. We have many customers that use both in their system with no issues and we have multiple application notes showing designs using both PowerPC and MGTs.

I personally have done a lot of analysis of Virtex-II Pro MGT operation here at Xilinx and have never seen a higher bit error due to the PowerPC being active. The PowerPC uses the same transistor design rules as the rest of the FPGA fabric and therefor has no process impact on the MGT performance either.

Ed

Excalibur does not have a 3Gbps serdes.

But what about the NIOS-II in a Stratix GX?

Petter

-- A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A: Top-posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing on usenet and in e-mail?

But, then it wouldn't have an "embedded processor comparable to the PowerPC 405". :-)

Ed