Design of an FPGA based bit error rate tester

Dave,

Thanks. This board http://www.altera.com/products/devkits/altera/kit-transceiver-si-stratix-v.html (http://www.altera.com/products/devkits/altera/kit-transceiver-si-stratix-v.html) would certainly be within my price range if I had confidence the application was going to work how I envision. I would prefer to have SMA connections since I will be interfacing with scopes and evaluation boards that use SMA connections and I am not a big fan using cable adapters. I'm not actually testing SFP modules but optical transceivers that are identical in functionality but are packaged different. The SFP module on the BERT will be used as a source to drive an optical receiver. I have attached a simple block diagram of my test application. I test both transmit and receive simultaneously. I use the BERT to drive the electrical input of an optical transciever and I view the output of the optical transmitter on a scope. I use an optical master (SFP module) to drive the optical input of the transceiver and measure the BER of the electrical output. If you think this application lends itself well to an FPGA based BERT please let me know. Do you know if Altera has demo boards to tryout an application without requiring purchase? I can't justify spending this type of money unless I am sure it is going to work.

Thanks