Low Latency 40G Ethernet Intel® FPGA IP User Guide: Agilex™ 5 FPGAs and SoCs

ID 813652
Date 11/25/2024
Public
Document Table of Contents

4.3.2. TX PCS

Figure 7. TX PCS

In MAC, PCS, and PMA variant, the TX PCS module is an internal block and this block is connected to the internal TX MAC block. Whereas in PCS and PMA variant, the MII data and control bus along with the other PCS control and status signals are provided as the user interface.

The TX PCS has four main components:

Block Encoder

The block encoder takes the 64-bit data blocks and 8-bit control blocks and encodes them into 66 bit encoded blocks. The TX PCS encodes two blocks per clock cycle.

Scrambler

The TX PCS scrambler takes two encoded blocks per clock cycles and scrambles them and produces two scrambled data blocks per clock cycle.

Alignment Marker Insertion

The alignment marker insertion blocks are used to insert an alignment marker on each virtual lane every 16,384 data blocks.

In the case of MAC, PCS, and PMA variant, the alignment marker is inserted inside the IP, however in the case of PCS and PMA mode, the user logic should indicate the AM location by asserting the tx_mii_am interface signal. The user logic must hold the tx_mii_am signal asserted for 2 clk_tx_mii consecutive clock cycles, counting only the valid cycles, to drive the insertion of an alignment marker. A valid cycle is one in which tx_mii_valid has the value of 1.

The am_period indicated with the number of valid clock cycles from the deassertion of tx_mii_am (alignment marker insertion bit signal) to the reassertion of tx_mii_am. For normal operation of the Ethernet link, you must ensure that the value of am_period is 32768 clock cycles (clk_tx_mii 312.5 MHz).

While you hold the value of the tx_mii_am signal at 1, you must freeze the values of both tx_mii_d and tx_mii_c.

Block Distributor

The block distributor takes the scrambled data blocks and alignment marker and distributes them round robin to the four virtual lanes.