Efficient and programmable ethernet switching with a NoC-enhanced FPGA
Andrew Bitar, Jeffrey A. Cassidy, Natalie Enright Jerger, Vaughn Betz · 2014
Communications systems make heavy use of FPGAs; their programmability allows system designers to keep up with emerging protocols and their high-speed transceivers enable high bandwidth designs. While FPGAs are extensively used for packet parsing, inspection and classification, they have seen less use as the switch fabric between network ports. However, recent work has proposed embedding a network-on-chip (NoC) as a new "hard" resource on FPGAs and we show that by properly leveraging such a NoC one can create a very efficient yet still highly programmable network switch.