Hardware Design And Implementation Of Network Development Platform Based On FPGA

FPGA-based network information processing is gaining more and more attention in high-performance network equipment development. By analyzing the current network development platform, a FPGA-based network development hardware platform is implemented in this paper. The platform is a PCI slot-based design, running on a Linux host machine. The platform design architecture and hardware-software modules are proposed. Schematic, PCB and the PCI-based network driver implementation are provided in the paper. The major research contents are as follows:Current network development platform architectures, including X86, ASIC, NP, FPGA architecture are introduced. The implementation mechanisms and principles of these architectures are analyzed. Advantages and disadvantages of them are also compared and presented. Based on the analysis, functions need to be supported in the network information processing platform are given. Finally, supporting knowledge and tools of the plarform are introduced.Modular design methodology is adopted in the platform implementation. Hardware and software design are contained. The hardware design is divided into several moudules, such as Virtex-5, SPARTAN, Memory and Network Interface module, etc. Software includes application, driver, and FPGA hardware logic. Application checks and configures the device parameters. Driver allocates and manages the necessary system resources. FPGA hardware logic is the core of network information processing. The paper is mainly focus on hardware implementation and driver design.The hardware design includes Schematic and PCB. Schematic is divided into several parts, including the clock circuit, PCI bus circuit, network interface circuit, configuration circuit, memory circuit, etc. Most parts of the schematic are introduced and completed. The PCB is a high-speed circuit board with frequency up to 1GHz. The high-speed circuit board design process such as layer stack, signal integrity handling are discussed. Constraint-driven Place&Route are implemented during the design in order to achieve circuit design target.Driver in the platform includes PCI device driver and network device driver. First, the PCI device is registered into the Linux kernel, and the network interfaces are initialized, then allocation of system resources for the PCI card and relevance of network interface to PCI device are done. Network device driver includes several modules: receiving data packets, sending data packets, interrupt handling module, and so on. DMA is an important technique in data transmission. The DMA operation and the module implementation are described in detail.Finally, the results of the hardware platform design are described. The main work in the paper is summarized and the future researches are also suggested.