Single ended XGMII
A few comments on using a single ended XGMII:
- Today we have several Quad SERDES chips in production, operating
at 1.25/2.5 Gbit/s with 8B or 10B interfaces. Most
use a 3.3V I/O swing, and I would guess about 40 ohm (nominal)
LVTTL/LVCMOS drivers. This effectively is a 32 bit interface.
I would say, these devices seem to function well for many companies.
- Some vendors are event moving to higher integration then
Quads, still using single ended interface. This further indicates
that noise is not a major problem.
- Single ended interface on the MAC side is not an issue. There
are many ASIC in production today with 400+ single ended I/Os,
and board with several tens of thousands of single ended nets.
- If we for XGMII use a (1.5 V swing) HSTL instead, and
move to a 50-55 ohm impedance controlled driver, we should be
able reduce the effective noise levels by close to a factor
of three.
My conclusion is that the industry keeps pushing the
capabilities of single ended interfaces, just because
differential interfaces double this pincount.
If we can reduce the noise by a factor of 3, and not
move up much in frequency, from existing proven solutions,
I believe we have a workable solution.
-Curt Berg-