Design and evaluation of FPGA-based gigabit-Ethernet/PCI network interface card

The continuing advances in the performance of network servers make it essential for network interface cards (NICs) to provide more sophisticated services and data processing. Modern network interfaces provide fixed functionality and are optimized for sending and receiving large packets. One of the key challenges for researchers is to find effective ways to investigate novel architectures for these new services and evaluate their performance characteristics in a real network interface platform.; This thesis presents the design and evaluation of a flexible and configurable Gigabit Ethernet/PCI network interface card using FPGAs. The FPGA-based NIC includes multiple memories, including SDRAM SODIMM, for adding new network services. The experimental results at Gigabit Ethernet receive interface indicate that the NIC can receive all packet sizes and store them at SDRAM at Gigabit Ethernet line rate. This is promising since no existing NIC use SDRAM due to the SDRAM latency.