Interfacing to 10Gig ethernet with Xilinx FPGAs

Hello there, I have a query for the more knowledgeable than me.. We've
been playing quite successfully with 1 gig Ethernet in our labs that
we're getting bold and want to move to 10Gig.

I was wondering if anyone else had experience of the various phy layer
transceivers that are available. We're about to sign the NDA's for
Marvell, Vitesse and Broadcom (if they ever get back to me....) so we
can get details on the various chips. But helpful hints from anyone here
would be nice..

The 10gig side will probably be an XFP interface cage, as we have a
couple of 10gig PCIexpress NICs that use those. Stealing an XPF fibre
module from that side of the lab is the easy part *wink*

I saw a powerpoint with info on the Xilinx RocketPHY chip, does that
still exist?? The links I tried all refused to work..

Our current board (Virtex4FX60 based, it has PCIexpress connector for
going into an 8lane socket, and also has a 4lane socket on it for adding
additional PCIexpress cards to it. ) has a nice samtec connector array
with at least 20 TX and 20 RX pairs on it which we're thinking of using
for the XSBI style interface, it has also got a fair number of single
ended connections for the slower management stuff as well.

We also have available 4 rocket IOs, however these come out via the top
PCIexpress motherboard style socket on the board. Our friendly pcb
designer laughs at the prospect of doing XAUI over those. It's the kind
of laugh that says "go away you firmware man and bother me not with such
crazy ideas" I am guessing he's probably correct?

Also, anyone played/experienced the Xilinx 10Gig MAC IPCore?

Before anyone asks, we're not building a NIC, but a novel high energy
physics R&D project for a DAQ system..

Cheers...

-- 
/\/\arc Kelly
..Just your average physicist trying to get by in a world full of normal
people...

Marc,

The 10G MGTs are all discontinued.

Anyone who had alrewady designed them in is supported.

But, there are no new orders accepted.

The issue was that the rate (10Gbs) was just too demanding for the 
design and technology.  By that, I mean yield of the final chips was 
unacceptable.  All MGTs had to work at all rates, over all temperatures, 
with the exact same bit settings.

10 Gbs also was a very tiny market segment (only a handful wanted it at 
all).

The hard part was that on any given chip, all MGTs would work well out 
to 13.5 Gbs, but they each required slightly different bit settings.

This required significant soft IP to find the settings for each MGT.  It 
was not considered a viable solution for the mass market.  Someday when 
we harden this IP, and re-design for the next generation, and more than 
just a few customers require it, 10 Gbs (+) will re-appear.

Until then, the separate phy chips are the best solution.

Austin

Hi Marc

The VSC8479 (Vittesse) chip works fine as weel the Xilinx 10Gig MAC
IPCore. We use both.

Cheers...

Austin wrote:
> The 10G MGTs are all discontinued.

> Until then, the separate phy chips are the best solution.

That has been my thinking, one of my current candidates is
http://www.vitesse.com/products/product.php?number=VSC8479
we're having to wait for our university management to sign the NDA
required to get full data sheets, but it looks promising.

I am presuming the V4 should cope with the 644Mhz for the XSBI
interface? Or is that pushing things a bit too much for a V4 and its
best to see if we can get a V5 development board to do this with?

Am slightly regretting the decision to say we could do 10Gig easily, our
networking people are too obsessed with more and more speed... :)

-- 
/\/\arc Kelly
..Just your average physicist trying to get by in a world full of normal
people...

Hi Marc,

Virtex-4 is enough for 10Gig but Virtex-5 has interesting feature like
OSERDES.

Alain wrote:

> The VSC8479 (Vittesse) chip works fine as weel the Xilinx 10Gig MAC
> IPCore. We use both.

Nice, that is the one I have been looking at.. So knowing someone else
has it working makes me slightly more confident I am not totally
bull****ing my bosses :)

Cheers for that

-- 
/\/\arc Kelly
..Just your average physicist trying to get by in a world full of normal
people...

Just curious if anyone knows any facts/rumors about any eval boards 
(like, say an ML403) that are 10G capable?

Hi Austin,

On 24 Feb., 18:15, Austin <aus...@xilinx.com> wrote:
> The 10G MGTs are all discontinued.
>
> Anyone who had alrewady designed them in is supported.
>
> But, there are no new orders accepted.
>
> The issue was that the rate (10Gbs) was just too demanding for the
> design and technology.  By that, I mean yield of the final chips was
> unacceptable.  All MGTs had to work at all rates, over all temperatures,
> with the exact same bit settings.

Speaking of fast networking with Xilinx FPGAs: I've read about getting
780MByte/s via TCP/IP using a Virtex4 with the stack from treck.com.
That should be fast enough for our current development. But in case we
need more in future, any idea how to implement this on a Xilinx FPGA?

Greetings, Torsten