Arria® V Device Handbook: Volume 2: Transceivers

ID 683573
Date 5/29/2020
Public
Document Table of Contents

6.7. Native PHY IP Configuration

The Native PHY IP is a full exposure of the transceiver hardware features with little abstraction of the physical hardware layer.

Access to both the Standard PCS and 10G PCS hardware, as well as PMA Direct modes can be enabled with full user control over the transceiver interfaces, parameters, and ports. Enable the Standard PCS and 10G PCS or PMA Direct mode to design for multi-datarate protocols, speed negotiation, and support multiple PCS datapath natively on the transceiver link.

The Transceiver Reconfiguration Controller is used to dynamically switch between the Standard PCS and 10G PCS datapaths. In addition, the Reconfiguration Controller is required for calibration, remote loopback enablement, PLL reference clock switching, channel PCS and PLL reconfiguration and switching, and to dynamically adjust PMA transmit pre-emphasis, receiver CDR, CTLE, and DFE advance settings.

Dynamic switching to and from PMA Direct mode is not supported.

Not all hardware combinations are legal or supported, so the user must have sufficient prior knowledge of the transceiver hardware, PLLs, and clocking architecture to determine valid PCS hardware setting, parameters, and combinations. All serial transceiver protocols can be supported by the Native PHY IP.

Note: Altera recommends all new serial protocol designs use the Native PHY IP with the exception of XAUI and PCI Express. A default preset is provided for ASI, SDI, SRIO, CPRI, GIGE, Interlaken, SAS, SATA, and other protocol configurations as well as Low Latency configurations for the Standard PCS and 10G PCS similar to the Low Latency PHY IP implementation. Users can also select the default preset for guidance and then modify the configurations for custom applications and have the ability to save the modified preset.

The transmit CMU or ATX Phase-Locked Loop (PLL) selection is embedded in the PHY IP. In addition, the fractional PLL (fPLL) can now be used as a transmit PLL for lane datarates up to 3.125Gbps. User must select the appropriate PLL for balancing datarate and jitter performance trade-off requirements. Unlike the other PHY IPs, the Native PHY IP does not have an Avalon Memory-Mapped (Avalon-MM) interface as the intent is to have direct access to the port interfaces. As a result, there are no embedded registers. In addition, the reset controller is also not embedded in the Native PHY IP. Altera recommends that the Transceiver PHY Reset Controller IP is used to implement the reset sequence and to make PLL sharing and merging effortless.

To implement a Native PHY link, instantiate the Arria V Transceiver Native PHY IP in the IP Catalog, under Transceiver PHY in the Interfaces menu. Select options to generate valid custom transceiver configurations or select the default preset for by double-clicking in the window menu.