10-Gbps Ethernet Hardware Demonstration

Recommended for:

  • Device: Stratix® IV GX

  • Quartus®: v11.0

author-image

By

Overview

Our 10-Gbps Ethernet Hardware Demonstration reference design provides a quick way to implement your 10-Gbps Ethernet (10GbE)-based design in an Intel® FPGA, and observe live network traffic flowing through various sections of a system. This design also helps you to verify your 10GbE-based system operation with a 10GbE media access controller (MAC) function and a standard off-the-shelf 10GbE SFP+ pluggable optical module or SFP+ direct coupled copper cable assembly. The 10GbE MAC is validated by the UNH-IOL.

The reference design is built with our 10GbE MAC and XAUI PHY Intel FPGA IP function with four 3.125-gigabit (Gb) serial transceivers in an Intel FPGA to implement one 10GbE XAUI port. The XAUI port is converted in a dual XAUI to SFP+ high speed mezzanine card (HSMC) (from Terasic) to 10-Gbps serial Ethernet providing network interface via low cost SFP+ optical pluggable module or SFP+ direct coupled cable assembly.

This reference design demonstrates the operation of the 10GbE MAC Intel FPGA IP function up to the maximum wire-speed performance with low-cost SFP+ interface in many loopback hardware configurations, as shown in Figure 1.

Features

  • Showcases one instance of the 10GbE MAC and XAUI PHY Intel FPGA IP function supporting 10GbE operations in XAUI mode and with low-cost SFP+ optical module or copper interface. For more information about the 10GbE MAC and XAUI PHY Intel FPGA IP, refer to the 10-Gbps Ethernet MAC Intel FPGA IP Function User Guide (PDF) and the Transceiver PHY IP Core User Guide (PDF).
  • System loopbacks at various points in the datapath that control, test, and monitor the 10GbE operations.
    • Loop A: XGMII interface local loopback
    • Loop B: FPGA serial physical medium attachment (PMA) interface local loopback
    • Loop C: Broadcom BCM8727 XGXS loopback
    • Loop D: Broadcom BCM8727 PMA serial loopback
    • Loop E: External SFP+ optical cable loopback
  • Sequential random burst tests with configurable number of packets, payload-data type, and payload size for each burst. A pseudo-random binary sequence (PRBS) generator generates the payload data type in fixed increments or in a random sequence.
  • Packet statistics for a PRBS generator and monitor, MAC transmitter (TX), and receiver (RX).
  • Packet classification of different frame lengths transmitted and received by the MAC.
  • Measure throughput for the traffic received by the traffic monitor.
  • Tcl-based System Console user interface that allows you to dynamically control the test, and configure and monitor any registers in this reference design.

Figure 1. 10-Gbps ethernet hardware demonstration reference design illustrating test and loopback configurations.

The dual XAUI to SFP+ HSMC board is available from Terasic.