Fixed-latency System for High-speed Serial Transmission Between FPGA Devices with Forward Error Correction

This paper presents the design of a compact protocol for fixed-latency, high-speed, reliable, serial transmission between simple field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA) devices. Implementation of the project aims to delineate word boundaries, provide randomness to the electromagnetic interference (EMI) generated by the electrical transitions, allow for clock recovery and maintain direct current (DC) balance. An orthogonal concatenated coding scheme is used for correcting transmission errors using modified Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem (BCH) code capable of correcting all single bit errors and most of the double-adjacent errors. As a result all burst errors of a length up to 31 bits, and some of the longer group errors, are corrected within 256 bits long packet. The efficiency of the proposed solution equals 46.48%, as 119 out of 256 bits are fully available to the user. The design has been implemented and tested on Xilinx Kintex UltraScale+ KCU116 Evaluation Kit with a data rate of 28.2 Gbps. Sample latency analysis has also been performed so that user could easily carry out calculations for different transmission speed. The main advancement of the work is the use of modified BCH(15, 11) code that leads to high error correction capabilities for burst errors and user friendly packet length.