| 10 Gigabit Ethernet has been standardized (IEEE 802.3ae), and products based on this standard are being deployed to interconnect MANs, WANs, Storage Area Networks, and very high speed LANs. The XAUI portion of the standard is primarily concerned with short range (up to 50 cm) chip-to-chip communication across printed circuit board traces. The UNH-IOL 10 Gigabit Ethernet Consortium, an industry-supported organization, performs PHY layer testing on products using a test system that has been partially implemented on a Xilinx ML321 evaluation board using the Virtex II-Pro FPGA.; A new implementation of the 10 Gigabit Ethernet XAUI test system on the existing ML321 evaluation board is presented in this thesis. The new design removes a number of limitations present in the original Xilinx test system, and it adds new features to the existing transmit and receive sub-systems that enable test engineers to expand the range of test cases and analyze them while simultaneously increasing the speed of testing. The new test system also eliminates the need for expensive test instruments. |
