Introduction to the netfpga Development Platform

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Introduction

Netfpga is a low-power development platform. It is used as a design tool for network hardware teaching and routing design. Netfpga makes it easy for researchers or university students to build a high-speed, hardware-accelerated network system. Originated in North America, it was originally a project used by Stanford University for classroom teaching. Netfpga brings configurable FPGA features into the network communication field and provides an open platform for more researchers to study next-generation networks. More and more people are paying attention to the features of netfpga, and many people are involved in open-source projects based on netfpga.

Netfpga Parameters

The netfpga platform (1) contains a Xilinx Virtex-2 Pro 50 FPGA that runs at a MHz clock frequency for user-defined logic design; it also contains Xilinx Spartan-ii fpga, runs the control logic of the PCI interface controller for communication with the master processor. Two MB external SDRAM and extended 64 mb ddr sdram make the data storage medium. The Platform also provides four Gigabit Ethernet interfaces to work with four Gigabit Ethernet controller soft Cores in FPGA. Netfpga also includes two SATA connectors that allow direct data exchange between multiple netfpga boards in a system without passing through the PCI bus.

Figure 1. netfpgaHardware components

Main Resources on the Board:

• Xilinx Virtex-2 pro fpga for logical design
• Xilinx spartan for PCI Main Interface
• 2*2.25 MB ZBT SRAM
• 64 MB DDR2 dram
• Four Gigabit Ethernet ports on the Physical Layer

Development Environment

System Architecture of netfpga (2 ). The research and development process mainly includes the design of the hardware layer (the design of the logic layer of FPGA) and the development of the software layer (corresponding to the driver development and application of the hardware layer ).ProgramDevelopment ).

Hardware

Purchase the host (the higher the configuration, the better), pay attention to the motherboard need to leave a PCI-E for the NIC, so the best choice of motherboard integrated graphics card.

Figure2. netfpgaSystem Framework

Software

Centos 4.4 and centos 4.5 centos 5.1 are recommended in the operating system. You need to configure Xilinx FPGA, so you need to install the ise9.1i software and related FPGA tools, for example, Modelsim (FPGA Logical simulation) and chipscope (On-Chip logical analysis. You also need to install netfpga base package, and Java and rpmforge Yum toolkit support before installation. Pay attention to the version of each software installed, because there is a large dependency between each other.

Open-source projects

You can find some source projects on http://www.netfpga.org/, as shown below:

1. NetFlow Probe
2. hardware accelerated Linux Router
3. netfpga Ethernet Switch
4. quad-port Gigabit Nic
5. netfpga openflow Switch

Multiple teams in China are developing and using netfpga. Open source projects can be found at http://www.openhsf-org/, such:

1. netfpga-Based Reconfigurable scientific computing platform (Ningxia University)
2. netfpga-based network traffic collector (Jinan University)
3. netfpga-based network processor design and implementation (Shandong University)
4. Design and Implementation of netfpga-based packet filtering Firewall (Harbin Engineering University)

From various open-source projects, we can see the practical application of netfpga, and believe it can promote the development of next-generation networks.

Note: I recently learned and applied FPGA and accidentally found some documents about netfpga on the Internet. Although this technology is just getting started, many netfpga projects are open-source, it is suitable for students, teachers, and researchers in colleges and universities to develop research. I believe it will bring more surprises in the near future. In China, netfpga has also attracted interest from many universities and companies, such as Beijing Jiao Tong University and Huawei, but it is still in its infancy. Therefore, netfpga is briefly introduced. For detailed Development Guide, seeReferences1.

References

1. netfpga open source official website http://netfpga.org/static/guide.html#Install_Software

2. Research on netfpga development, http://www.eefocus.com/myspace/blog/show_155829.html

3. open source hardwareCommunityHttp://www.openhw.org/activity/opproject/