Characterizing Jitter Performance of Multi GigabitFPGA-Embedded Serial Transceivers

摘要

High-speed serial links are a key component of dataacquisition systems for High Energy Physics. They carry physicsevents data and often also clock, trigger and fast control signals.For the latter applications, the jitter on the clock recovered fromthe serial stream is a critical parameter since it directly affectsthe timing performance of data acquisition and trigger systems.Latest Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) include multi-gigabit serial transceivers, which are configurable with variousoptions and support many data encodings. However, an in-depthjitter characterization of those devices is not available yet. In this paper we present measurements of the jitter on theclock recovered by a GTP transceiver (embedded in a XilinxVirtex 5 FPGA) as a function of the data pattern, coding andlogic activity on the transmitter and receiver FPGAs.