Cyclone® V Avalon® Streaming (Avalon-ST) Interface for PCIe* Solutions User Guide

ID 683524
Date 6/02/2020
Public
Document Table of Contents

1.1. Cyclone V Avalon-ST Interface for PCIe Datasheet

Altera® Cyclone® V FPGAs include a configurable, hardened protocol stack for PCI Express® that is compliant with PCI Express Base Specification 2.1 or 3.0. The Hard IP for PCI Express using the Avalon Streaming (Avalon-ST) interface is the most flexible variant. However, this variant requires a thorough understanding of the PCIe® Protocol. The following figure shows the high-level modules and connecting interfaces for this variant.

Figure 1.  Cyclone V PCIe Variant with Avalon-ST Interface
Table 1.  PCI Express Data Throughput

The following table provides bandwidths for a single transmit (TX) or receive (RX) channel. The numbers double for duplex operation. Gen1 and Gen2 use 8B/10B encoding which introduces a 20% overhead.

Link Width
×1 ×2 ×4

PCI Express Gen1 (2.5 Gbps)

2

4

8

PCI Express Gen2 (5.0 Gbps)

4

8

16

Refer to the PCI Express High Performance Reference Design for more information about calculating bandwidth for the hard IP implementation of PCI Express in many Altera FPGAs.