PCB High-Speed Signal Design Guidelines: Agilex™ 5 FPGAs and SoCs

ID 821801
Date 11/18/2024
Public
Document Table of Contents

3.6.4. SFP Connector Routing

Add ground vias on both sides of the connector ground pin and connect them with short, thick ground trace to minimize the inductance of the ground connection. Keep the connector ground pins locally shorted to maintain an equal potential. Altera suggests routing Tx and Rx on different layers. Length matching for each pair is required. Both P and N lanes must be in phase to recover the data. Always use the minimum routing length from the FPGA to the connector to minimize insertion loss. For breakout design, refer to the following figures where 8 mils drill hole and 16 mils pad size are used in SOM. You may consider a larger anti-pad size such as 18 mils in the simulation. It is advisable to conduct a 3D simulation to optimize the breakout area based on specific stack-up. Try to make return loss lower than -15 dB at Nyquist frequency (lower than -20 dB is better) and control the impedance changing of cut-out area by making it as small as possible (ideally within ±5 ohm). You may use similar cut-out shape and change the size of cut-out shape in your simulation structure based on your own stack-up to optimize the performance.

In order to obtain best SI performance, the width of signal pins of SFP TX and RX are reduced to 0.35 mm on the carrier board, work with specific connector vendor about this value and run simulation to verify.

Figure 39. SFP Cut-Out Size for L3 High-speed Traces Fan-out
Figure 40. SFP Cut-Out Size for L5 High-speed Traces Fan-out
Figure 41. Simulated Return Loss for SFP (a) L3 and (b) L5 Fan-out