Design and synthesis of a software-based transceiver PHY controller

Sammanfattning: Companies developing integrated circuits are expected to enhance their products’ performance at every new release, while reducing size and power consumption. The demand for more elaborate and diverse functionality, together with a reduced time-to-market, irremediably raises costs and increases the probability of bugs. Even high-performance ASICs are not immune: the complexity of the design flow implies significant non-recurring engineering and production costs. Similar challenges affect the FPGA design flow, where the allocation of programmable logic requires considerable engineering effort. Moreover, due to the limited visibility of internal operations, isolating and back-tracing malfunctions are open challenges. Ericsson AB is exploring novel approaches to deal with this complex ecosystem.This thesis investigates the feasibility and the benefits of a flexible design approach, by developing and characterizing a Proof-of-Concept (PoC) transceiver handler for highspeed link applications. The flexibility lies in the software-based controller, exploited to handle the reset and dynamic reconfiguration of a transceiver physical layer (PHY). The objective of the software implementation is to simplify error detection and on-the-fly modification compared to a traditional HW-based controller. The firmware, running on a Nios II soft-core processor, drives the control signals while monitoring the transceiver’s status. Unexpected synchronization losses are handled by a dedicated Interrupt Service Routine.The correct HW/SW interaction has been tested through simulation, whereas the software profiling proves that the timing requirements are met (only 167µs are spent on the reset sequence). Finally, the PoC has been benchmarked against an analogous system with a traditional HW-based controller, to evaluate the drawbacks of the introduction of a soft-core processor (in terms of logic utilization and power consumption).Despite the promising engineering effort reduction, further research is required to scale up the system and move from the PoC stage towards product release.