Introduction

The PolarFire® family of FPGAs include multiple embedded low-power, performance-optimized transceivers. Each transceiver has both the Physical Medium Attachment (PMA), protocol Physical Coding Sub-Layer (PCS) logic, and interfaces to the FPGA fabric. The transceiver has a multi-lane architecture with each lane natively supporting serial data transmission rates from 500 Mbps (250 Mbps with interpolation) to 12.7 Gbps.

This user guide describes the transceiver block available in the PolarFire family. The FPGA fabric is common to the PolarFire family, which consists of the following FPGA devices.

PolarFire FPGAs

Microchip's PolarFire FPGAs are the fifth-generation family of non-volatile FPGA devices, built on state-of-the-art 28 nm non-volatile process technology. PolarFire FPGAs deliver the lowest power at mid-range densities. PolarFire FPGAs lower the cost of mid-range FPGAs by integrating the industry’s lowest power FPGA fabric, lowest power 12.7 Gbps transceiver lane, built-in low power dual PCI Express Gen2 (EP/RP), and, on select data security (S) devices, an integrated low-power crypto co-processor.

PolarFire SoC FPGAs

Microchip's PolarFire SoC FPGAs are the fifth-generation family of non-volatile SoC FPGA devices, built on state-of-the-art 28 nm non-volatile process technology. The PolarFire SoC family offers industry's first RISC-V based SoC FPGAs capable of running Linux®. It combines a powerful 64-bit 5x core RISC-V Microprocessor Subsystem (MSS), based on SiFive’s U54-MC family, with the PolarFire FPGA fabric in a single device.

RT PolarFire FPGAs

Microchip's RT PolarFire FPGAs combine our 60 years of space flight heritage with the industry’s lowest-power PolarFire FPGA family to enable new capabilities for space and mission-critical applications. RT PolarFire FPGA family includes RTPF500T, RTPF500TL, RTPF500TS, RTPF500TLS, RTPF500ZT, RTPF500ZTL, RTPF500ZTS, and RTPF500ZTLS devices.

The following table summarizes the transceiver components available in the PolarFire family.

The transceiver includes all required analog functions for high-speed data transmission between devices over printed circuit boards (PCB) and high-quality cables. The transceiver is suitable for a variety of device-to-device communication protocols, as listed in the following table.