Triple Speed Ethernet with 1588

As the leading provider of 1 Gbps Ethernet (GbE) for FPGA and HardCopy® ASIC devices, Altera offers the Triple-Speed Ethernet MegaCore® function, allowing you to easily build systems with a 10/100/1000 Mbps Ethernet network connection. Altera's Triple-Speed Ethernet consists of a 10/100/1000 Mbps Ethernet media access control (MAC) and physical coding sublayer (PCS) intellectual property (IP). This IP function enables Altera® FPGAs to interface to an external Ethernet PHY device, which, in turn, interfaces to the Ethernet network.

The Triple-Speed Ethernet's external Ethernet serial interfaces (SGMII and 1000Base-X) are available in all Altera FPGAs and HardCopy ASICs with serial transceivers. You can also find these interfaces in Altera devices with LVDS I/Os with dynamic phase alignment (DPA) that can operate up to 1.25 Gbps. The LVDS I/Os enable very scalable multi-port GbE system designs while leaving serial transceivers for higher performance protocols. The parallel interfaces are also available in Cyclone®, Arria® GX, and Stratix® FPGA families and HardCopy ASIC families.

Figure 1 shows the Triple-Speed Ethernet MegaCore function in an Altera device with a serial transceiver or with LVDS I/Os with DPA. The physical medium attachment (PMA) in the embedded serial transceivers is compliant to the IEEE 1000BASE-X PMA standard and compatible with SGMII specification. The PMA can alternatively be an LVDS I/O pin with DPA for SGMII interface.