Altera Stratix GX Transceiver - Manual (Page 47)

Altera Corporation 3–1
January 2005
3. Basic Mode
Introduction The basic mode of the Stratix ® GX device includes the following features:
■ Serial data rate range from 500 Mbps to 3.1875 Gbps
■ Input reference clock range from 25 to 650 MHz
■ Parallel interface width of 8, 10, 16, or 20-bit support
■ 8B/10B encoder/decoder can be enabled or bypassed
■ Word aligner supports 7-bit, 10-bit, 16-bit, or bit slip mode
Applications like packet or streaming data applications, chip-to-chip
connectivity, backplanes, or board-to-board connectivity, which do not
have a defined protocol overhead or a custom protocol to transfer data
serially over a medium, can use the basic mode offered by Stratix GX
devices. The basic mode includes SERDES and parallel interconnect
functionality. In this mode, the transceiver performs serialization and de-
serialization with an optional 8B/10B coding scheme. Basic mode is not
aware of the system level protocol wrapped on top of it.
Basic mode enables a subset of the transceiver blocks for customizable
configuration. The channel aligner and the rate matcher features are not
available in basic mode.
This chapter details the supported digital architecture, clocking schemes,
and software implementation for basic mode.
Figure 3–1 shows a block
diagram of a duplex channel configured in basic mode.
The digital section starts at the word aligner of the receiver channel and
propagates up to the device logic array.