Design and implementation of high speed transmitter based on fiber channel protocol

Abstract

Fiber Channel (FC) communication protocol is now popularly being used as an interconnection protocol due to the fact that it caters to the requirement of high speed transmission. It also supports features like flexible topology, high bandwidth, distance insensitiveness, good anti-interference and low delay. The higher speed and lower delay of the Fiber Channel communication protocol is making it a good solution for communication protocol in Avionics environment. In this paper the design and implementation of the Fiber Channel communication protocol based transmitter on the FPGA is proposed. The Fiber Channel communication protocol transmitter is designed to work in accordance to the point to point topology with the Class 3 service of the FC standard. The transmitter is designed to transmit the application data through Encoder and Serializer using Gigabit Transceiver Port (GTP) on the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) via optical fiber. The protocol can be used to transmit various types of application data based on the application/upper layer protocol that is being used with the fiber channel protocol. The proposed implementation uses the Spartan-6 SP605 FPGA and the Small Form Factor Pluggable (SFP) as the platform for implementation.