Altera Plug & Play Signal Integrity for Stratix II GX FPGA

Altera introduced its Plug & Play Signal Integrity technology, which redefines FPGA use in high-performance systems by enabling a single card configuration to be plugged into any designated system slot while under system power. The solution is enabled by the latest Quartus II design software and available now in production Stratix II GX FPGAs.

Danny Biran, Altera, said:

Altera continues to deliver FPGA transceiver innovation to customers by providing system designers with the only plug-and-play signal integrity capability available in an FPGA…

…Our FPGAs' ability to plug into a powered system and automatically adjust to varying system and environmental conditions allows our customers to reduce inventories, simplify maintenance procedures and shorten time to market. The ADCE itself significantly reduces the tedious characterization effort that is the result of high-speed systems having varying link characteristics across card slots.

Altera’s Plug & Play Signal Integrity is an exclusive combination of Altera's Adaptive Dispersion Compensation Engine (ADCE) and the hot-socketing capability. When hot-swapping a single card configuration in a system, the ADCE automatically monitors and adjusts itself for interconnect loss and environmental variations to provide the higher performance and reliability.

Plug & Play Signal Integrity provides designers and system architects with production-qualified, hot-socketable Stratix II GX FPGAs that now can actively monitor and automatically compensate for signal degradation in multi-gigabit system interconnects due to manufacturing, voltage, temperature, and design variations. Altera's Plug & Play Signal Integrity solution continuously adjusts equalizer settings for each of up to 20 receivers found in the Stratix II GX FPGA family to provide the best eye opening for non-return-to-zero (NRZ) signals operating between 2.5 Gbps and 6.375 Gbps.

Altera’s
Plug & Play Signal Integrity can be enabled with the customer beta release of Quartus II software version 7.2. which can be obtained from Altera's local sales representatives. The production version of Quartus II software will be available for download next month.

More info: Altera’s Plug & Play Signal Integrity