Stratix II GX Transceivers

Nov 29, 2006 3 Replies
J

Hello, I'm looking to do a design involving data rates near 4Gbps and was looking at using Altera's Stratix II GX transceivers to drive the data to a 4Gbps single-mode fiber-optic transceiver. I'm interested in how well the Stratix can perform this task, if anyone has some experience using the transceivers could you please let me know how well it worked for you? I've read the Altera's web site on the Stratix II GX and it sounds very promising, I just want to make sure that is does what it says it can.



thanks, joe



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B

Hi Joe,

I've been toying around with Altera's own Signal Integrity board, and 6GBps over 40" of trace plus 2ft of copper interconnect through SMAs works just fine. 4GBPS over optic should be relatively easy.

Feed the GX 100MHz of clock, put the PLLs into 40x, set the ALTGXB transceiver interface to double-width mode (200MHz is workable in the core,

400MHz is really, really stressing things), and as long as you properly do your power decoupling and PCB layout you should have a working design. You may need to tweak the pre-emphasis and/or equalization settings a bit to get the best results, but so far the transceivers seem to be rock-solid.

Best regards,

Ben

Best to contact your local (disti) FAE to provide you with the reference schematic and board layout files of the SI board for reference.

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J

Hello, and thanks for responding to my post. Quick question, did you have to pay for any IP to use the transceivers or is it free?

thanks, joe

Ben Twijnstra wrote:

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J

Hi, say would I use the SerialLite II megafunction to drive my data out of the FPGA to my fiber-optic transceiver? I'm not doing SONET or ATM or any particular protocol. The fiber-optic transceiver I plan to use is PECL or CML.

joe

Ben Twijnstra wrote:

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