Due to a problem in the Intel® Arria® 10 or Intel® Cyclone® 10 GX device calibration code, you may see a high BER after power-up or user-mode calibration of an RX simplex transceiver, when the corresponding unused transmitter is preserved with one of the following Intel® Quartus® Prime Settings File (QSF) assignments.
Global preservation QSF assignment
set_global_assignment –name PRESERVE_UNUSED_XCVR_CHANNEL ON
Per-pin preservation QSF assignment
set_instance_assignment –name PRESERVE_UNUSED_XCVR_CHANNEL ON –to <pin name>
The simplex receiver channel may not be calibrated correctly if its corresponding unused transmitter is preserved. Simplex receiver channels whose corresponding transmitter are not preserved are calibrated correctly.
You can use one of the following methods to work around this problem.
- In cases where the unused transmitter will never be used, and does not need to be preserved, you can remove the QSF assignment for the corresponding transmitter pin.
- In cases where the unused transmitter may be used in the future and preservation is required, you can instantiate a minimum datarate, dummy simplex transmitter corresponding to the used simplex receiver. You can set a static 0x00 pattern on the Tx parallel port, and select minimum VOD.
- This problem was fixed in the Intel® Quartus® Prime Pro Edition software version 19.1, Intel® Quartus® Prime Standard Edition software version 18.1 update 1 and later versions of the Intel® Quartus® Prime software.