Xilinx Stanford Digilent NetFPGA Open Platform Gigabit Network Development

[DiTBho]

Yesterday eBay sent me some promotional email about the old Digilent NetFPGA Virtex-II Pro FPGA Development System

The NetFPGA is the low-cost re-configurable hardware platform optimized for high-speed networking. The NetFPGA includes all of the logic resources, memory, and Gigabit Ethernet interfaces necessary to build a complete switch, router, and/or security device. Because the entire datapath is implemented in hardware, the system can support back-to-back packets at full Gigabit line rates and has a processing latency measured in only a few clock cycles. 

It seems there is a multi-university research ecosystem hosted at netfpga dot org, with design examples and other resources.

eBay mentioned this:

NetFPGA 1G
   The NetFPGA is the low-cost reconfigurable hardware platform optimized for high-speed networking. The NetFPGA includes the all fo the logic resources, memory, and Gigabit Ethernet interfaces necessary to build a complete switch, router, and/or security device. Because the entire datapath is implemented in hardware, the system can support back-to-back packets at full Gigabit line rates and has a processing latency measured in only a few clock cycles.

    Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) Logic
    Xilinx Virtex-II Pro 50
    53,136 logic cells
    4,176 Kbit block RAM
    up to 738 Kbit distributed RAM
    2 x PowerPC cores
    Fully programmable by the user
    Gigabit Ethernet networking ports
    Connector block on left of PCB interfaces to 4 external RJ45 plugs
    Interfaces with standard Cat5E or Cat6 copper network cables using Broadcom PHY
    Wire-speed processing on all ports at all time using FPGA logic
    1 Gbits * 2 (bi-directional) * 4 (ports) = 8 Gbps throughput
    Static Random Access Memory (SRAM)
    Suitable for storing forwarding table data
    Zero-bus turnaround (ZBT), synchronous with the logic
    Two parallel banks of 18 MBit (2.25 MByte) ZBT memories
    Total capacity: 4.5 MBytes
    Cypress: CY7C1370D-167AXC
    Double-Date Rate Random Access Memory (DDR2 DRAM)
    400 MHz Asynchronous clock
    Suitable for packet buffering
    25.6 Gbps peak memory throughput
    Total capacity: 64 MBytes
    Micron: MT47H16M16BG-5E
    Multi-gigabit I/O
    Two SATA-style connectors to Multi-Gigabit I/O (MGIO) on right-side of PCB
    Allows multiple NetFPGAs within a PC to be chained together
    Standard PCI Form Factor
    Standard PCI card
    Can be used in a PCI-X slot
    Enables fast reconfiguration of the FPGA over PCI bus without using JTAG cable
    Provides CPU access to memory-mapped registers and memory on the NetFPGA hardware
    Hardware Debugging ports
    JTAG cable connector can be used to run Xilinx ChipScope Pro
    Flexible, Open-source code
    BSD-style open-source reference router available from the NetFPGA.org website

Umm,  Xilinx Virtex-II Pro 50 ... PCIX, and dram: what do you think?

[hamster_nz]

Do you have access to a license for the EDA tools? If not, it is a brick.

[DiTBho]

Do you have access to a license for the EDA tools? If not, it is a brick.

Unfortunately no.

[Morgan127]

I would not go for that board. VII Pro is deprecated and it is not even supported by the latest ISE Tools. So you have to find an old version of ISE and probably a old version of operating system if that should run stable. I had to go through this procedure a couple of months ago to fix a new firmware to an old VPII Pro product.
So my advise is forget Virtex II Pro.

[Scrts]

So my advise is forget Virtex II Pro.

I second this. It was already old 10 years ago.