Intel® MAX® 10 Clocking and PLL User Guide

ID 683047
Date 12/26/2023
Public
Document Table of Contents

2.3.14. PLL Reconfiguration

The PLLs use several divide counters and different VCO phase taps to perform frequency synthesis and phase shifts. In Intel® MAX® 10 PLLs, you can reconfigure both counter settings and phase shift the PLL output clock in real time. You can also change the charge pump and loop filter components, which dynamically affects the PLL bandwidth.

The following PLL components are configurable in real time:

  • Pre-scale counter (N)
  • Feedback counter (M)
  • Post-scale output counters (C0-C4)
  • Charge pump current (ICP)
  • Loop filter components (R, C)

You can use these PLL components to update the following settings in real time without reconfiguring the entire FPGA:

  • Output clock frequency
  • PLL bandwidth
  • Phase shift

The ability to reconfigure the PLL in real time is useful in applications that may operate in multiple frequencies. It is also useful in prototyping environments, allowing you to sweep PLL output frequencies and dynamically adjust the output clock phase.

For instance, a system generating test patterns is required to generate and send patterns at 75 or 150 MHz, depending on the requirements of the device under test. Reconfiguring the PLL components in real time allows you to switch between two such output frequencies in a few microseconds.

You can also use this feature to adjust clock-to-out (tCO) delays in real time by changing the PLL output clock phase shift. This approach eliminates the need to regenerate a configuration file with the new PLL settings.

Figure 24. PLL Reconfiguration Scan ChainThis figure shows the dynamic adjustment of the PLL counter settings by shifting their new settings into a serial shift register chain or scan chain. Serial data shifts to the scan chain via the scandata port, and shift registers are clocked by scanclk. The maximum scanclk frequency is 100 MHz. After shifting the last bit of data, asserting the configupdate signal for at least one scanclk clock cycle synchronously updates the PLL configuration bits with the data in the scan registers.

The counter settings are updated synchronously to the clock frequency of the individual counters. Therefore, not all counters update simultaneously.

The dynamic reconfiguration scheme uses configuration files, such as the Hexadecimal-format file (.hex) or the Memory Initialization file (.mif). These files are used together with the Avalon ALTPLL RECONFIG Intel® FPGA IP to perform the dynamic reconfiguration.