MGT

Here’s a peek at the first units of the SERDES FMCs, the first low pin-count FPGA Mezzanine Card to enable multi-gigabit transceivers on the ZedBoard and other FPGA boards that don’t have internal MGTs. The first board is designed for SFP modules for Ethernet and optical applications whereas the second board has SATA connectors for custom applications. Both boards are compliant to the VITA 57 standard. Stay tuned for the performance results this week! [Read More]

Yesterday I received the bare PCBs for the SERDES SFP FMC, my new product that enables 2 multi-gigabit transceivers on the ZedBoard or other LPC FMC carriers that don’t have internal MGTs. In the last couple of weeks I’ve been working hard on a demo design in Vivado which you can find on Github here: https://github.com/fpgadeveloper/zedboard-serdes-sfp-fmc So far all timing passes at the board’s top speed of 3.125Gbps (or 2.5Gbps with DC balanced encoding). [Read More]

After years designing products for other companies, I’ve finally designed something for my own company. If you have a ZedBoard and you want to experiment with MGTs, now you can with my two new SERDES low-pin-count FMCs. Both boards use the DS32EL0421/DS32EL0124 serializer/deserializer devices from Texas Instruments to provide two external multi-gigabit transceivers from any standard FMC carrier regardless of whether the FPGA has internal MGTs or not. The external MGTs can transmit and receive data up to 2. [Read More]

Overview In this tutorial we will use a RocketIO MGT for possibly its simplest application, a programmable oscillator. This can be achieved by feeding the MGT with a repetitive data pattern (e.g. “10101010101010101010”). By changing the data pattern we can adjust the output frequency and duty cycle. Figure: The Oscillator peripheral --> The diagram above illustrates the oscillator peripheral. In it we use 4 registers to store a 4 x 32 bit repeating pattern to be fed to the RocketIO primitive (GT_CUSTOM). [Read More]

RocketIO Frequently Asked Questions Here is a list of common questions about RocketIO: What is the best way to get started developing with the RocketIOs? The RocketIOs are very sophisticated devices and require a lot of time to understand and integrate into your designs. Fortunately, Xilinx provides many tools and examples to help you get developing faster. Here are our suggestions: Download the Aurora IP core from the Xilinx website. [Read More]