Intel® Advanced Link Analyzer: User Guide

ID 683448
Date 4/01/2024
Public
Document Table of Contents

1. Intel® Advanced Link Analyzer Overview

Updated for:
Intel® Quartus® Prime Design Suite 24.1

Intel® Advanced Link Analyzer is a high-speed transceiver link simulator. When designing high-speed, multi-gigabit transceiver links, you must ensure end-to-end performance from the transmitter (TX) to the receiver (RX) and all interconnects in between.

Intel® Advanced Link Analyzer's graphical user interface (GUI) and link simulator allow you to quickly and easily set up and evaluate high-speed link performance early in your design cycle. Intel® Advanced Link Analyzer also helps you identify possible issues in board-level design. With Intel® Advanced Link Analyzer, you can quickly estimate optimal link equalization and other electrical parameter settings for the transmitter and receiver. You can also use Intel® Advanced Link Analyzer to predict link performance, such as jitter and noise at a small probability level.

Intel® Advanced Link Analyzer can simulate serial links with a clock-forwarding structure, which uses a dedicated clock path to transmit a clock signal that the receiver uses for timing resolution tasks, such as equalization and data determination. To simulate a clock-forwarding serial link, you need a clock signal IBIS-AMI transmitter and an IBIS-AMI receiver model that supports the input clock signal. Currently, Intel® Advanced Link Analyzer supports clock-forwarding IBIS-AMI models as per Buffer Issue Resolution Documents (BIRD) 197, 204, 208, and 209 listed on the IBIS Open Forum.

Note: The clock path simulation support is a beta feature in the Quartus® Prime software version 24.1.