PolarFire SoC Gigabit Ethernet MAC

The PolarFire SoC MSS contains two hardened Gigabit Ethernet MAC IP blocks—GEM_0 and GEM_1— to enable Ethernet solutions over copper or optical cabling.  GEM_0 and GEM_1 are functionally identical, hence, GEM_0 and GEM_1 are referred as GEM throughout the document.

GEM supports 10 Mb/s, 100 Mb/s, and 1000 Mb/s (1 Gb/s) speeds. GEM provides a complete range of solutions for implementing IEEE 802.3 standard-compliant Ethernet interfaces for chip-to-chip, board-to-board, and backplane interconnects.

Important: PolarFire SoC MSS supports SGMII only, and its RX FIFO supports clock frequency offset of 0 ppm only. Gigabit Ethernet designs that require a clock tolerance of ±300 ppm must use the PolarFire IOD CDR IP core (PF_IOD_CDR), which is instantiated in the FPGA fabric.