The goal of this project is to eventually port the entire NetFPGA software and hardware infrastructure to the Altera DE5 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 NetFPGA website to see more details.
The DE5 is the latest 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. Although the DE5 contains many of the same basic components as the NetFPGA card, its logic and memory capacity is much higher, facilitating more advanced networking research projects. DE5 development board features the PCI Express interface, which will accelerate card-host transfer rates by over an order of magnitude.
The DE5 board in our project integrates the state-of-the art Stratix V GX FPGA 5SGXEA7N2F45C2. The key features of DE5 include: