XAUI v12.3 Product Guide
136
PG053 April 6, 2016
Appendix C:
Debugging Designs
What Can Cause Synchronization and Alignment to Fail?
Synchronization (
debug[4:1]
) occurs when each respective XAUI lane receiver is
synchronized to byte boundaries. Alignment (
debug[5]
) occurs when the XAUI receiver is
aligned across all four lanes.
Following are suggestions for debugging loss of Synchronization and Alignment:
• Monitor the state of the
signal_detect[3:0]
input to the core. This should either
be:
• connected to an optical module to detect the presence of light. Logic 1 indicates that
the optical module is correctly detecting light; logic 0 indicates a fault. Therefore,
ensure that this is driven with the correct polarity.
• tied to logic 1 (if not connected to an optical module).
Note:
When
signal_detect
is set to logic 0, this forces the receiver synchronization state machine
of the core to remain in the loss of sync state.
• Loss of Synchronization can happen when invalid characters are received.
• Loss of Alignment can happen when invalid characters are seen or if an /A/ code is not
seen in all four lanes at the same time.
• See the following section,
Problems with a High Bit Error Rate
Transceiver Specific
• Ensure that the polarities of the txn/txp and rxn/rxp lines are not reversed. If they are,
these can be fixed by using the
txpolarity
and
rxpolarity
ports of the transceiver,
which can be accessed from outside the core by enabling the transceiver control and
status port option.
• Check that the transceiver is not being held in reset or still be initialized by monitoring
the
mgt_tx_reset
,
mgt_rx_reset
, and
mgt_rxlock
input signals to the XAUI
encrypted HDL. The
mgt_rx_reset
signal is also asserted when there is an RX buffer
error. An RX buffer error means that the Elastic Buffer in the receiver path of the
transceiver is either under or overflowing. This indicates a clock correction issue caused
by differences between the transmitting and receiving ends. Check all clock
management circuitry and clock frequencies applied to the core and to the transceiver.
What Can Cause the XAUI Core to Insert Errors?
On the receive path the XAUI core will insert errors RXD=FE, RXC=1, when disparity errors or
invalid data are received or if the received interframe gap (IFG) is too small.