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Altera_Forum
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15 years ago

Stratix4GX PCIe development board to used as root port

I wanted to know if anyone has used the Altera Stratix4GX PCIe card as a root port. I have used it as endpoint but have not used as a root- port. As an endpoint all I have to do is plug in t...
Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
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15 years ago

You know, a PCIe root port is not a switch port. If you want to design a PCIe switch, you would have to design a (soft) L2 IP on your own, I think.

In PCIe, a Switch is an addressable and visible entity inside the fabric. It sure does most of its task on L2 which is packet forwarding and maintenance of link-specific DLLP handling like flow control, but it does quite something on L3 as well. A dual-port switch is in fact a bridge, and such a bridge could be designed to be transparent and promiscuous above L2.

I think their clever part will be that they don’t emulate the physical layer of the ASIC design but they inject straight into L2 (DLL), that makes them transparent but let the user verify most of his design.