Forum Discussion

Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
13 years ago

LVDS clock lines and data lines left right problem

Background: I have to interface an ADC board that was designed to interface with Xilinx FPGA but now the requirement is to interface with a stratix 4. So the ADC board was not designed keeping stratix 4GX in mind.

There is one clock and 8 output LVDS channels. 6 channels are connected to Bank5, 1 channel is connected to bank6 and the last one is connected to bank2. clock is going to AB6. Problem is that i cant connect the 8th channel, which is connected to bank2, to the deserializer. Lot of errors pop up. (Left and right side problem i suppose) What i understand is that the clock coming in AB6 pin cannot deserialize the bank6 lvds channel.

Anybody faced this issue before? Is there any patch that i can put in the constraints file to avoid this error? Half of my brain has burnt out. Please help the other half from burning.

Solutions, suggestions and recommendations are highly appreciated.

5 Replies

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
    Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor

    I haven't looked at the layout, but you're right that high-speed IO serdes use dedicated circuitry, including dedicated clock channels from the PLL that only drive IO on its side of the device. This allows for lower skew and much high frequency operation, but is less flexible. This is a physical restriction in the silicon, not just the software.

    What's the clock rate and is it DDR? If it's not too fast, you might be able to use a global clock tree, which can drive all I/O, but has less performance.
  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
    Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor

    Thanks Rysc:

    It is DDR and 1120Mbps per channel

    Can you help me out on the global clock tree solution?

    I think i need to have a dedicated external clock coming to the bank2 (left side) of the FPGA too. Right?

    That is currently not possible... hmmmmm
  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
    Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor

    Yes 560MHz clock. I will try the global clock option and let me go through the document.

    Meanwhile any shortcuts are welcome.