Design and implement a Graphical User Interfaced control program for Mellanox Technologies products SerDes block. The program configures the SerDes operation mode according to user input, and displays the RX BER Eye Diagram, a tool for measuring transmission quality.
Mellanox Technologies is a leading supplier of end-to-end solutions in fast data communication. Among company’s products: switches, adapters, IC chips, cables and software, which designed to accelerate system performance. Company products are used in a vast variety of applications, such as storage, cloud, financial services, high performance computing and more.
A key component in Mellanox’ products is the SerDesb lock, which converts slow rate parallel data into high rate serial data and vice versa. Mellanox’ SerDes is capable of transmitting high rate serial data, supporting numerous communication standards: InfiniBand, Ethernet and PCI-Express. Mellanox’ SerDes has many modes of operation, adjusted to the communication standard and the effects of transmission line between components. These modes of operation are normally set automatically by device’s Firmware.
When we wish to test the SerDes in the company’s lab, or display its performance to customers, we sometimes need to operate the SerDes manually. For this purpose, in this project we’ve created a control program with a graphical user interface, for the SerDes block. The program is allowing the user to select the SerDes mode of operation, and test the quality of transmission. One of the important features of the program, is displaying the receiver eye diagram, a tool that assists estimating reception quality, and was not available in the company prior to this project.
The program developed in this project will be used both as a toll for company’s engineers and as a tool for demonstrating SerDes’ performance.