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Triple Speed Ethernet IP interfacing with RS422 on DE5-net

Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
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Hello everyone, 

 

I need to bring up an interface between a DE5-net SoC Board and PC. The Board has a Stratix V (5SGXEA7N2F45C2) device. The speed requirement is rather high (need to load 250MB of data to DDR3 SDRAM) so Ethernet connection is a good option. 

 

I can use a Triple Speed Ethernet (TSE) IP instance and interface it with the RJ45 connector. But the on-Board PHY chip is LTC2855 which has a RS422 interface directly connected to the FPGA pins while TSE has MII/GMII/RGMII/SGMII interfaces. Many boards have a Marvell 88E1111 PHY which seamlessly interfaces with TSE and RJ45 connector. 

 

I need to know how can I interface the MAC functionality of TSE (MII signals) to RS422 signals? Is there another IP available that can do that or I need to write custom logic to perform this transformation? 

 

Any help is appreciated. Or if there is a better way of transferring large amount of data to SDRAM then I am open to suggestions. 

 

Thank you and regards.
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Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
589 Views

You should run linux on the ARM core and use it's Ethernet. To do it any other way is to embark on a path of pain.

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Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
589 Views

I do understand that its painful to go through all the trouble. By the way, no Hard processor on this FPGA. Can use a NIOS II soft-core but again running a linux on it would be another headache.  

 

Anyway I heard back from Terasic people (DE5-net board vendor) that the RJ45 on this board can not be used to implement Ethernet connection! So for now I'll look into other options.
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Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
589 Views

Sorry for the misunderstanding about the board. I was thrown off because you said Soc in your posting. That usually means one of the embedded ARM chips. I should have known better because there isn't a Stratix chip with embedded ARM. 

 

In any case, If I were you I'd locate one of the example projects that uses Ethernet, download the exact Quartus version it uses and make sure the example can be built from scratch. Test it to make sure it works. 

 

After you have a working build, make small changes bit by bit to the example to make it more like what you want to end up with. Save a copy of the project before each change so you can compare a working project to one that doesn't work. 

 

There are so many settings and places that can go wrong that it's very hard to get everything right starting from scratch. It's better to start with something that works and add on to it.
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Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
589 Views

Thank you for your valuable suggestions. I am indeed working with TSE example design, hopefully I will be able to bring up the functionality I need.

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