To enable in-system serial I/O validation and debugging, the Vivado Design Suite includes a serial I/O analysis feature. This allows you to measure and optimize your high-speed serial I/O links in your FPGA-based system. The Vivado serial I/O analyzer features are designed to help you address a range of in-system debug and validation problems from simple clocking and connectivity issues to complex margin analysis and channel optimization issues. The main benefit of using the Vivado serial I/O analyzer over some other external instrumentation techniques is that you are measuring the quality of the signal after the receiver equalization has been applied to the received signal. This ensures that you are measuring at the optimal point in the TX-to-RX channel thereby ensuring real and accurate data.
The Vivado tool provides the means to generate the design used to exercise the gigabit transceiver endpoints and the runtime software to take measurements and help you optimize your high-speed serial I/O channels. Serial I/O Hardware Debugging Flows guides you through the process of generating the IBERT design. Debugging the Serial I/O Design in Hardware guides you through the use of the runtime Vivado serial I/O analyzer feature.