Verification of 400 GbE on an FPGA Platform with Optical Modules

With the increasing processing data traffic of big data, 5G networks, 8K video and other applications, the existing 100 Gb/s transmission system is no longer sufficient. This paper proposes a 400 Gb/s Ethernet (400 GbE) verification platform based on FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Array), including TRX (transceiver) PMA (Physical Medium Attachment), 400 Gb/s QSFP-DD (Quad Small Form-factor Pluggable Double Density) optical modules and optical fibers, 8-lane QSFP-DD MCB (Module Compliance Board), which is used for loopback and outgoing signals to facilitate testing. The PAM-4 (Pulse-Amplitude Modulation 4-Level) is adopted, and the TRX PMA terminal has 8×53.125 Gb/s electrical signals, which will be converted into 4×106.25 Gb/s optical signals through the optical modules. The feasibility of this verification platform has been demonstrated by measuring the signal eye height and eye width and monitoring the error rate of the loopback link, laying the foundation for future research on implementing 400 Gb/s SmartNIC (Network Interface Card) based on FPGA, integrating PCIe (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express) 6.0 and CXL (Compute Express Link) 3.0 technologies.