DE4 NetFPGA

The goal of this project is to eventually port the entire NetFPGA software and hardware infrastructure to the Altera DE4 platform.

NetFPGA is a widely used FPGA-based platform for network experimentation, teaching and research. It integrates a low-cost FPGA-based networking board, which contains four 1 Gbps Ethernet interfaces with free open source software and gateware. It enables researchers to explore new networking approaches with low startup investment. Go to the NetFPGA website to see more details.

The DE4 an FPGA development board from Terasic Technologies that integrates the state of the art Altera Stratix V FPGA with four 10 Gigabit Ethernet interfaces, several high speed I/Os, and high density static and dynamic memory interfaces. The DE4 development board features a PCI Express interface.

The DE4 board in our project integrates a 40nm FPGA Stratix IV EP4SGX230.

• Stratix IV GX EP4SGX230
• 228,000 logic elements
• 17,133K embedded memory bits
• 1,288 18-bit x 18-bit multipliers
• 4 x 1 GigE Ethernet interfaces
• Integrated 1.25GHz SERDES
• PCI Express x8
• Support for up to 2 PCI Express hard IP cores
• Memory devices
• 2MB ZBT SSRAM
• Two DDR2 DRAM DIMM sockets
• Up to 8 GB external DDR memory
• FPGA programming via USB-Blaster / JTAG

The DE4 is also available with a Stratix IV GX EP4SGX530, containing 530,000 LUTs.