Altera rolls out signal integrity development kit for 28nm Stratix-V GX SERDES

The Altera transceiver development board for the 28nm Stratix V GX FPGA is available for $4,995.

Altera Corporation has announced availability of a signal integrity development kit for the 28nm Stratix® V GX FPGA SERDES (serializer-deserializer) , which will enable design engineers to evaluate and develop transceiver links for high-bandwidth applications ranging from 600 Mbps to 12.5 Gbps.  Users of the kit can verify compliance with popular communication protocol standards, including 10GbE, 10GBASE-KR, PCI Express® (PCIe®) Gen1, Gen2 and Gen3, Serial RapidIO®, Gigabit Ethernet (GbE), 10 GbE XAUI, CEI-6G, CEI-11G, HD-SDI, Interlaken and Fiber Channel.

The $4,995 kit includes the Stratix V GX development board (5SGXEA7N2F40C2NES) and a one-year license for the company's Quartus® II design software. Altera also provides design examples and access to their MegaCore® IP library, including the Nios® II Embedded Design Suite.

Features of the Stratix V kit include:

Configuration status and set-up elements:

• JTAG
• On-board USB Blaster
• FPP configuration via MAX II device and flash memory
• Two configuration file storage
• Temperature measurement circuitry (Die & Ambient temperature)

Clocks:

• 50MHz, 125MHz, programmable oscillators (preset values: 624 MHz, 644.5 MHz, 706.25MHz,875 MHz)
• SMA connectors for supplying an external transceiver differential reference clock.
• SMA connectors for supplying an external differential clock to the FPGA fabric.
• SMA connectors to output a differential clock from the FPGA's phase locked-loop (PLL) output pin.

General user input/output

• 10/100/1000Mbps Ethernet PHY (RGMII) with RJ-45 (copper) connector.
• 16x2 character LCD.
• One 8-position dip.switch.
• Eight user LEDs.
• Four user pushbuttons.

Memory devices

• 128-megabyte (MB) sync flash memory (primarily to store FPGA configurations).

High speed serial interfaces

• Seven full duplex transceiver channels routed to SMA connectors.
• Short trace routed on a micro-strip.
• Six strip-line channels from the with all the trace lengths are matched across channels.
• 21 full-duplex transceiver channels routed to backplane connector.
• Seven channels to Molex® Impact® connector.
• Seven channels to Amphenol® XCede®.
• Seven channels to footprint of Tyco Strada® Whisper® connector.

Power

• Laptop DC input
• Voltage margining

Pricing and availability
You can purchase the kit directly from Altera's website at http://www.altera.com/products/devkits/altera/kit-transceiver-si-stratix-v.html, where you can also download the user's guide and reference manual.