KCU105 Evaluation Board

For those of you who want to experiment with processorless Ethernet on FPGAs, I’ve just released a 4-port example design that supports these Xilinx FPGA development boards:

• Artix-7 AC701 Evaluation board
• Kintex-7 KC705 Evaluation board
• Kintex Ultrascale KCU105 Evaluation board
• Virtex-7 VC707 Evaluation board
• Virtex-7 VC709 Evaluation board
• Virtex UltraScale VCU108 Evaluation board
• Virtex UltraScale+ VCU118 Evaluation board

Here’s the Git repo for the project: Processorless Ethernet on FPGA

Why processorless?

Pure hardware designs can trump software where the need for low latency and/or high throughput is greater than the need for flexibility and complexity (eg. the support of complex protocols). There are lots of applications that rely on hardware based packet processing to achieve their superior performance. High frequency trading platforms are often fed market pricing over multicast UDP, so their profitability is directly linked to their ability to process UDP with the lowest possible latency. Network security devices that monitor traffic usually need to be as transparent as possible while also being able to detect threats and take action with the lowest possible delay. Whatever your reason for processing Ethernet frames in the FPGA fabric, make sure that you consider both sides of the coin:

I’ve just done a video to demo Intelliprop’s NVMe Host Accelerator IP core on the Xilinx Kintex Ultrascale KCU105 dev board and the Samsung 950 Pro M.2 NVMe SSD. To connect them together I’ve used the FPGA Drive FMC plugged into the HPC connector to give us a 4-lane PCIe Gen3 interface with the SSD. The read/write speeds I got are simply incredible and line up very well with the numbers I wrote about in an earlier post. So here they are:

Just released a video showing how to connect an M.2 SSD to the FPGA Drive FMC.

I’ve got the Kintex Ultrascale Development Kit on my desk today so it’s a good time to take a look inside and see what’s special about this board. The Ultrascale (20nm) and Ultrascale+ (16nm) FPGAs are taking over from the Series-7 devices (28nm), and I’ve seen more and more customer interest in them in recent months. The Kintex Ultrascale is the little brother of the Ultrascale family, providing the “best price/performance/watt” and “an optimum blend of capability and cost-effectiveness” according to Xilinx.

I’ve been totally overloaded with projects in the last couple months but I’m back with some really exciting news today. A few months back a company called IntelliProp, based in Colorado, released a NVMe Host Accelerator IP core for interfacing FPGAs with NVMe SSDs. This IP core allows reads and writes to be performed directly from the FPGA fabric, without the latency overhead of an operating system (read about the NVMe speed tests I did under PetaLinux). IntelliProp has tested their IP core with an FPGA Drive FMC loaded with a Samsung 950 Pro 256GB SSD and here are the results: