Available in Stratix® and Arria® series FPGAs and HardCopy® ASICs with integrated multi-gigabit transceivers, Plug & Play Signal Integrity lets you change the position of backplane cards on the fly while eliminating the painstaking process of manually reconfiguring your backplane equalization settings.
View the demo video to see Plug & Play Signal Integrity in action.
With this capability, you can design systems with truly universal cards that plug into multiple card positions in system backplanes (as shown in Figure 1). Altera’s hot-socketable transceivers, coupled with adaptive dispersion compensation engine (ADCE) technology, deliver Plug & Play Signal Integrity where the same card configuration can be used, irrespective of slot position in most systems.
In our 28-nm Stratix V FPGAs, the adaptive engine extends beyond linear equalization. When operating high-speed serial links in noisy environments, the benefits of the 5-tap decision feedback equalization (DFE) mitigates the effects of cross-talk to ensure high reliability of a system with a low bit-error ratio (BER).
Figure 1. Hot-Socketable Plug & Play Signal Integrity
Plug & Play Signal Integrity offers wide-ranging benefits:
- Reduced card-type inventories
- Increased system flexibility
- Reduced maintenance and training costs
- Simplified order code management
- Reduced effort in the lab, since you no longer need to characterize every card slot to determine the optimal signal integrity setting for each one.
When you design with Altera, you can design with the confidence that variations (in manufacturing, materials, temperature, voltage, and silicon process) are continuously monitored and compensated for by the ADCE to deliver the best eye opening and system BER performance.
