AN 738: Intel® Arria® 10 Device Design Guidelines

ID 683555
Date 6/30/2017
Public
Document Table of Contents

1.11.3. PHY Layer Transceiver Components

Transceivers in Arria® 10 devices support both Physical Medium Attachment (PMA) and Physical Coding Sublayer (PCS) functions at the physical (PHY) layer.

A PMA is the transceiver's electrical interface to the physical medium. The transceiver PMA consists of standard blocks such as:

  • serializer/deserializer (SERDES)
  • clock and data recovery PLL
  • analog front end transmit drivers
  • analog front end receive buffers

The PCS can be bypassed with a PCS-Direct configuration. Both the PMA and PCS blocks are fed by multiple clock networks driven by high performance PLLs. In PCS-Direct configuration, the data flow is through the PCS block, but all the internal PCS blocks are bypassed. In this mode, the PCS functionality is implemented in the FPGA fabric.