Altera’s Stratix III FPGAs support SGMII on LVDS I/Os

Altera Corporation has announced its Stratix III FPGAs support Serial Gigabit Media Independent Interface (SGMII) on its LVDS I/Os. Offering interface speeds of 1.25 Gbps and meeting SGMII’s stringent jitter performance requirements, Stratix III LVDS I/Os support triple-speed Ethernet (10/100/1000 Mbps) interfaces without transceivers. Stratix III FPGAs are the industry’s first programmable logic devices able to support Gigabit Ethernet SGMII on LVDS pins, offering lower costs, lower power and more interfaces per device.

The SGMII I/Os featured in Stratix III FPGAs allow the device to connect to Gigabit Ethernet ports through small form-factor pluggable (SFP) optical modules. Using Stratix III FPGA’s LVDS channels, customers can integrate a large number of Gigabit Ethernet channels in high-port-count applications, such as 96-port SGMII switches.
Stratix III FPGA LVDS channels support Gigabit Ethernet SGMII as a result of the architecture’s low jitter performance, dynamic phase aligner (DPA) and soft clock-data recovery (CDR) mode. Soft-CDR, which is implemented in the programmable fabric as IP, supports SGMII by extracting the clock out of the clock-embedded data.

Altera