> Unfortunately, having all of the transceivers in a single quad was a bit limiting due to the 7 series clocking architecture: they share the same QPLL, which has to be at 10.3125 Gbps for 10Gbase-R operation. While the CPLLs can be configured freely, they have a lower Fmax which meant that the BERT / CDR trigger channels cannot operate at arbitrary frequencies above 6 Gbps (most notably, 8 Gbps operation for PCIe gen3 mode is not available).

I'm glad someone understands this.

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stephen_g 2 days ago | parent [-]

This one is especially tricky since even if you know what a phased lock loop (PLL) is, the terms CPLL and QPLL are specific to the arrangement of transceivers in these specific Xilinx FPGAs (7 series being one family of FPGAs which came before the UltraScale and then UltraScale+ series). There are four transceivers in a ‘quad’ which can either run from their ‘Channel PLL’ (CPLL) or the shared ‘Quad PLL’ that can run much faster to do basically double the line rate.

	▲	azonenberg 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah it's always tricky to decide how much detail to include in these posts. If I had gone on a whole explanation of the full 7 series GTX clocking architecture the post would easily have been another few pages in length.