Home // International Journal On Advances in Systems and Measurements, volume 7, numbers 1 and 2, 2014 // View article

An Integrated into FPGA System for Optical Link Testing and Parameters Tuning

Authors:
Anton Kuzmin
Dietmar Fey
Ulrich Lohmann

Keywords: Optical fiber communication; Transceivers; FPGA; Microcontrollers; Embedded software

Abstract:
Development, characterization and performance optimization of systems utilizing FPGAs with high-speed serial transceivers to implement optical links with 1 to 10 Gbps data rate is a complex task and it poses several challenges for design engineers. In this paper, an effective approach is presented designed to address these challenges based on the use of diagnostic features implemented in the transceivers and a soft-IP microcontroller system instantiated in the FPGA. The use of the soft-IP controller allows a single-point access to the control and diagnostic interfaces of all components forming the link. Combined with computational capabilities and a high-level programming language interpreter running on the soft-IP CPU inside the FPGA, it enables extensive optical link performance evaluation without relying on any additional test and measure- ment equipment and significantly shortens debugging and testing times. Two generations of the system including hardware, soft- IP microcontroller system and embedded software are presented. The implementation demonstrates the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach to utilization of on-chip diagnostic capabilities.

Pages: 141 to 149

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2014. Used with permission.

Publication date: June 30, 2014

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-261x