Low Latency 40- and 100-Gbps Ethernet MAC and PHY MegaCore Function User Guide

ID 683628
Date 12/28/2017
Public
Document Table of Contents

1. About the Low Latency 40- and 100-Gbps Ethernet MAC and PHY IP Core

Updated for:
Intel® Quartus® Prime Design Suite 16.0

The Altera® Low Latency 40- and 100-Gbps Ethernet (40GbE and 100GbE) media access controller (MAC) and PHY MegaCore® functions offer the lowest round-trip latency and smallest size to implement the IEEE 802.3ba 40G and 100G Ethernet Standard with an option to support the IEEE 802.3ap-2007 Backplane Ethernet Standard.

Note: This user guide documents the 16.0 version of the Altera Low Latency 40- and 100-Gbps Ethernet MAC and PHY IP core that targets a Stratix® V device or an Arria® 10 device. For the 16.1 release and beyond, two IP core user guides are available to document the Low Latency 40-Gbps Ethernet IP core and the Low Latency 100-Gbps Ethernet IP core separately. These two user guides document the variations that target an Arria® 10 device. As of 2017.12.28, the 16.0 version of the Stratix® V Low Latency 40-100GbE IP core is the most recent Stratix® V Low Latency 40-100GbE IP core available in the Self-Service Licensing Center and this user guide provides its most current documentation.

The version of this product that supports Arria® 10 devices is included in the Altera MegaCore® IP Library and available from the Quartus® Prime IP Catalog.

Note: The full product name, Low Latency 40- and 100-Gbps Ethernet MAC and PHY MegaCore Function, is shortened to Low Latency (LL) 40-100GbE IP core in this document. In addition, although multiple variations are available from the parameter editor, this document refers to this product as a single IP core, because all variations are configurable from the same parameter editor.
Figure 1. Low Latency 40GbE and 100GbE MAC and PHY IP CoresMain blocks, internal connections, and external block requirements.

As illustrated, on the MAC client side you can choose a wide, standard Avalon® Streaming (Avalon-ST) interface, or a narrower, custom streaming interface. Depending on the variant you choose, the MAC client side Avalon Streaming (Avalon-ST) interface is either 256 or 512 bits of data mapped to either four or ten 10.3125 Gbps transceiver PHY links, depending on data rate, or to four 25.78125 Gbps transceiver PHY links.

The 40GbE (XLAUI) interface has 4x10.3125 Gbps links. The 100GbE (CAUI) interface has 10x10.3125 Gbps links. For Arria 10 devices only, you can configure a 40GbE 40GBASE-KR4 variation to support Backplane Ethernet. For Arria 10 GT devices only, you can configure a 100GbE CAUI-4 option, with 4x25.78125 Gbps links.

The FPGA serial transceivers are compliant with the IEEE 802.3ba standard XLAUI, CAUI, and CAUI-4 specifications. The IP core configures the transceivers to implement the relevant specification for your IP core variation. You can connect the transceiver interfaces directly to an external physical medium dependent (PMD) optical module or to another device.

The IP core provides standard MAC and physical coding sublayer (PCS) functions with a variety of configuration and status registers. You can exclude the statistics registers. If you exclude these registers, you can monitor the statistics counter increment vectors that the IP core provides at the client side interface and maintain your own counters.