Stratix V Device Handbook: Volume 2: Transceivers

ID 683779
Date 11/23/2021
Public
Document Table of Contents

6.4. On-Chip Signal Quality Monitoring (Eye Viewer)

The bit error rate (BER) eye contour can be used to measure the quality of the received data. Eye Viewer is a debug and diagnostic tool that analyzes the received data recovery path, including the receiver's gain, noise level, and recovery clock jitter. Eye Viewer can also measure vertical eye height, effectively allowing a BER eye contour to be plotted.

Eye Viewer uses a phase interpolator (PI) and sampler (SMP) to estimate the horizontal eye opening. Controlled by a logic generator, the PI generates a sampling clock and the SMP samples the data from the receiver output. The SMP outputs parallel data that is monitored for CRC or BER errors. When the PI output clock phase is shifted by small increments, the data error rate goes from high to low to high if the receiver is good. The number of steps of valid data is defined as the width of the eye. If none of the steps yield valid data, the width of the eye is equal to 0, which means the eye is closed.

The Transceiver Reconfiguration Controller provides an Avalon-MM user interface to enable the Eye Viewer feature.