Serial Lite IV Intel® Stratix™ 10 FPGA IP Design Example User Guide

ID 683223
Date 11/01/2021
Public
Document Table of Contents

3.7.2. Toolkit GUI Settings

The Serial Lite IV IP toolkit offers an easy-to-manage user interface.
The Serial Lite IV IP toolkit user interface has three tabs.
  • The MAC and PHY tab implements various control and status registers (CSR) for both the hardened custom PCS core and the MAC soft logic.
  • The Traffic Statistics and Bandwidth Performance tab implements various Control and Status Registers (CSR) for the Demo Management module to configure the traffic generator and checker. Additionally, it also provides a real-time bandwidth calculation measurement result based on the traffic modules instantiated in the example design.
  • The Help tab provides useful next-step troubleshooting information based on the assertion and deassertion of specific status registers or output ports if any errors happen after the link initialization is executed.

The MAC and PHY tab shows a step-by-step guide for link initialization and real-time status monitoring of a Serial Lite IV IP link.

The toolkit continuously reads and displays all of the essential status registers related to the Serial Lite IV IP link after you execute the following stages:

  1. Click Assert Full System Reset to perform a full system reset.
  2. Click Link Initialization to perform link initialization with internal/external loopback enabled..
  3. Click Read PCS Status to poll all corresponding status registers and output ports from both hardened custom PCS and MAC soft logic.
  4. Click Read FEC Statistics to generate the FEC statistics report after steps 1–3 complete successfully and the link is up and running.
Figure 21. MAC and PHY Tab
Note: The toolkit user interface changes dynamically to illustrate each execution stage.

In case of any failure, the toolkit narrows down to the type of failure based on the various status bits, which are based on the register bank or output port from the hardened custom PCS core or MAC soft logic. The corresponding next-step debugging information is displayed in the Help tab.

Figure 22. Traffic Statistics and Bandwidth Performance Tab
The Traffic Statistics and Bandwidth Performance tab enables you to configure both the traffic generator and checker in the design example to run in the user-specified traffic mode, and reads traffic statistics. You can turn on the Sink RX to Source TX parameter to run the hardware design example in slave mode. When this parameter is enabled, the traffic flows from sink to source. Additionally, the toolkit also calculates and displays the real-time effective bandwidth based on the design example.
Figure 23. Help Tab

The Help tab provides useful next-step debugging information based on the errors or status registers reported from the MAC and PCS status in the MAC and PHY tab.