Hi All The Vitesse VCS8488 PHYs used on the 10GbE mezzanine cards on ROACH2 run, by default, with no Electronic Dispersion Compensation (EDC). They do however have provision for this to be enabled, by loading an application onto the PHY itself. We have tested this and found a dramatic decrease in receive path bit error rate.
That's the good news. The bad news is that the application is under NDA from Vitesse, and can be accessed only after each user organisation signs a separate NDA directly with Vitesse. We asked if we could use one NDA for the whole CASPER community, but it was politely declined. The process is quite simple: - Register as a user on www.vitesse.com - Fill in the attached NDA form and send it to [email protected] - Once approved, they will grant you access to the magical file "vsc848x_EDC_FW_1_14.bin" - Copy that file into the same directory as the bof files. - The latest version of borf_server will look for the file at startup. If present and not yet loaded, it will load the application into NVM on the PHYs. If the file is not present, it will simply skip the loading and continue as before. The improvement in performance is significant, so it would probably be worth your while to do this, even though the NDA process is a bit cumbersome. Thank you -- Steve Dennehy CBF Systems Engineer SKA-SA
VQFF_10095_rev6 final locked (2).docx
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