From 1G to 10G: code reuse in action

Abstract

Ever increasing traffic quantities and link-bandwidths force network devices to meet ever-increasing demands; the march to 100G is well under way. The high-speed networking of today is no longer that of five years ago: Unfortunately, such growth contrasts with current financial forces and this leads organisations to find ways to save money. As a result many developers face the common problem: how to make existing, systems reusable in this new, higher-speed scenario? To attack this problem, we propose new, flexible, legacy support mechanics for designs built using System on a Chip (SoC) and System on FPGA (SoFPGA). We illustrate our approach using the widely used, open-source, NetFPGA platform presenting a migration path for existing 1G designs to plugin into the new NetFPGA 10G board without alteration to code structure.