Parallel CRC On An FPGA At Terabit Speeds

Abstract

The Cyclic Redundancy Check Algorithm (CRC) is critical for ensuring high data reliability in serial communication such as Ethernet networks, allowing for the detection of corrupted packets with a programmable and arbitrarily small probability of failure. The baseline algorithm, however, is highly serialized due to read after write (RAW) dependencies, preventing efficient parallelization of the algorithm for use in hardware. We built a fully parameterizable open-source IP core that has no such dependencies to produce the equivalent result as the baseline CRC algorithm but in a form that can be fully parallelized, with fully automated pipelining, which works for any CRC polynomial, and with a low-resource end-of-packet alignment. This allows for up to 64-bit CRC to be computed in an FPGA at 4 Tbps.