I know almost nothing about transceivers, how do I learn how to use them for my benfit?

[gyuunyuu]

I am aware of the existence of multi-gigabit transceivers. These can exist as standalone devices or be part of the FPGAs and can be used for very high speed serial data transmission. These are used in ubiquitous protocols like PCIe and USB among others.

Although I have some idea about the basic idea behind the theory self synchronous data transfer where clock is recovered from the data, I have never used them. I want to learn how to use transceivers for high speed data transfer between FPGAs.

It seems that most FPGA boards do not contain FPGA with transceivers that one can play around with. I am not sure why this is so. 

How do I learn how to use transceivers for data transfer between FPGAs, where do I start from?

[Deshi_Intel]

Hi,

What you are asking is very generic questions here.

Let me try to guide you through 3 questions below as different FPGA product has different transceiver architecture to support different application needs

1. Do you plan to learn on any specific high speed protocol ?

• If you have some protocol in mind, then you can either google for training material or choose to attend some training class offered by the training vendor

1. Do you have preference to use any Intel FPGA product family as I mentioned the transceiver architecture is different for different FPGA family ?

• If you don't have any preference then I suggest you to checkout below website to learn about latest Intel FPGA transceiver technology
  • https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/programmable/support/support-resources/support-centers/xcvr-phy-support.html

1. Finally, you can explore below Intel FPGA dev kit board website to find suitable dev kit board that suit you need, Most of the dev kit board do expose transceiver channel port ?

• you can find more info about Intel FPGA dev kit board in below link
  • https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/details/fpga/find-fpga-boards.html#sort=%40title%20ascending

Thanks.

Regards,

dlim

[gyuunyuu]

All I know is that transceivers can give a very high speed data transfer. I want to use it for this benefit.

[Deshi_Intel]

Yup, transceiver can operate in very high speed.

If you don't have any specific learning agenda then feel free to explore the suggested link that I shared with you in earlier post.

Thanks.

Regards,

dlim

[gyuunyuu]

Lets start from somewhere. Lets just assume that I want to transmit data really really fast from one FPGA to another, on the same PCB or through a backplane. Now in this world full of flood of terms and things like Ethernet, PCIe, XAUI, SGMII, Interlaken e.t.c e.t.c., how do we know where to start? Lets say I want some rate e.g 2.5 Gb/s. Now what do I do next?