A New Embedded Platform for Rapid Development of Networking Applications

• http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2396573

FPGA, Zynq, Embedded, Networking

NetFPGA-1G has shown its potential in enabling fast traffic processing while introducing no packet loss and minimal delay. Now it is time to scale down in order to enable a massive deployment of the FPGA solutions in networking. We propose and build a low-cost and low-power platform which is be capable of hosting embedded applications with FPGA support. Such a platform might enable faster deployment of new ideas in networking and might prove useful for large-scale experiments (stacks of platforms) as its size, power consumption and cost are expected to be ten times lower of the NetFPGA-cube. It is recognized that the FPGA coupled with the host processor comprises a powerful platform for network traffic processing. The logic of such a solution is clear. Computational intensive tasks are handled by the FPGA logic whereas more complex tasks by the processor. The proposed platform aims at such a design in which the FPGA and the processor are even more tightly coupled together on a single die SoC solution. As a proof of this concept, we build a platform called uG4-150. Its FPGA hosts a synthesized softcore processor (e.g. Xilinx MicroBlaze). But our final goal is to utilize the hardcore processor (e.g. ARM-based) integrated with the FPGA such as Xilinx Zynq.