Cyclone III and MLVDS

[Altera_Forum]

Hi, All. 

 I am new here, so sorry if I posted this in a wrong place.   We are developing a boad that will use a Cyclone III device to communicate with other boards over the backplane. The idea is to have several boards transmitting signals to this Cyclone III device. Currently we are talking about a point-to-point connection, but in the future we might wish to resort to a bus that would connect all the boards over the backplane.    We wish to use some sort of LVDS connection that would enable us to build a bus later and will support live insertion as well. This leads us to either M-LVDS or B-LVDS.   At this stage, we are planning to have only one board with the Cyclone III device, all the other boards will have the appropriate (M-LVDS or B-LVDS) buffers.   The question is therefore: 1) Will Cyclone III communicate correctly with M-LVDS (this is the preferrable solution) buffers?   2) How can we make sure that the bus won't be affected by inserting / removing the board with the Cyclone device on it?     Thanks in advance, Pavel

[Altera_Forum]

Did you see the Application Note 522, it is exclusively discussing the M-LVDS topic? 

http://www.altera.com/literature/an/an522.pdf

[Altera_Forum]

no, I haven't seen it. 

 thanks a lot!

[Altera_Forum]

well, I've read the doc and it anwers my question almost perfectly. 

 the only thing is that we prefer to use MLVDS and not BLVDS. I know that these standards are much the same, but there is a slight difference in the voltages.   My question is: will this difference affect the application?   thanks a lot for your help.

[Altera_Forum]

I'm not aware of the differencs in detail, but expect, that they are compatible in a practical view.

[Altera_Forum]

You can certainly use MLVDS without loosing your signal integrity.

[Altera_Forum]

thanks a lot! :)