Knowledge Base Article
Why might my Intel® Stratix® 10 L-Tile or H-Tile transceiver device stop transmitting data when compiled with the Intel® Quartus® Prime software versions 19.3 and earlier?
Description
Due to a problem in the Intel® Stratix® 10 L-Tile and H-tile transceiver calibration code firmware in the Intel Quartus Prime Pro software versions 19.3 and earlier, a transceiver calibration access may randomly power down the transmitter buffer.
A background calibration or user-recalibration of any channel, ATX PLL, or fPLL within the transceiver tile may cause this.
When this happens, the transceiver channel PMA register offset 0x112 is corrupted and cleared to 0x00. This is because 0x112[0] represents cgb_powerdown and powers down the TX buffer when it is ‘0’.
This problem may occur in any transceiver L-Tile or H-Tile used in Intel® Stratix® 10 GX, SX, MX, and TX devices compiled with the Intel Quartus Prime Pro software versions 19.3 and earlier.
Example transceiver configuration use applications that may be impacted are:
- Production H-Tile transceivers running at data rates≥ 17.5Gbps which have background calibration enabled automatically by the Intel Quartus Prime Pro software.
- Any transceiver L-Tile or H-Tile design with more than one used transceiver channel and any user-recalibration process is performed.
- Any of the Intel IPs listed below are affected.
Ethernet H-tile Hard IP for Ethernet Intel FPGA IP
25G Ethernet Intel FPGA IP
Low latency 100G Ethernet Intel FPGA IP
Low Latency 40G Ethernet Intel FPGA IP
10GBASE-KR PHY Intel Stratix 10 FPGA IP
1G/2.5G/5G/10G Multi-rate Ethernet Intel FPGA IP
Interlaken Interlaken (2nd Generation) Intel FPGA IP
SerialLite Serial lite III Streaming Intel FPGA IP
Serial RapidIO RapidIO II Intel FPGA IP*
JESD JESD204B Intel FPGA IP*
Audio/Video Display Port Intel FPGA IP
HDMI Intel FPGA IP
SDI II Intel FPGA IP
Transceiver PHY L-tile/H-tile Transceiver Native PHY Intel Stratix 10 FPGA IP*
Resolution
This problem is fixed in the Intel® Quartus® Prime Pro software versions 19.4 and later.
To resolve this problem, upgrade to the latest device manager firmware for the Intel® Quartus® Prime Pro Edition Software 21.1/21.2/21.3/21.4/22.1/22.2/22.3.
The latest device manager firmware versions are available from the following link:
What is the latest device firmware for Intel® Agilex™ and Intel® Stratix® 10 devices?
If you are using programming files (.POF, .RBF, .RPD, .JIC) that are generated from your .SOF file with the Intel Quartus Prime Pro Edition software versions 19.3 and earlier, you must update them using either the Intel Quartus Prime Pro software version 19.4 Programmer or the Intel Quartus Prime Pro software version 19.1, 19.2, or 19.3 with a patch installed.
This problem is also described in the Intel® Stratix® 10 Device L-Tile and H-Tile Transceiver Calibration Code Firmware Update, Customer Advisory ADV1919.
https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/programmable/us/en/pdfs/literature/pcn/adv1919.pdf