NVMe Streamer

NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) has become the prominent choice for connecting Solid-State Drives (SSD) when storage read/write bandwidth is key. Electrically, the NVMe protocol operates on top of PCIe; it leaves behind legacy protocols such as AHCI, and thus scales well for performance. MLE has been integrating PCIe, and NVMe, into FPGA-based systems for a while. Now, MLE releases NVMe Streamer, an IP Core for NVMe Streaming, which is a so-called Full Accelerator NVMe host subsystem integrated into FPGAs, and most prominently into Xilinx Zynq Ultrascale+ MPSoC and RFSoC devices.

MLE’s new NVMe Streamer is the result of many successful customer projects and responds to the embedded market’s needs to make use of modern SSDs. NVMe Streamer is a fully integrated and pre-validated subsystem stack operating the NVMe protocol fully in Programmable Logic (PL) with no software running, keeping the Processing System (PS) out of this performance path. For Xilinx FPGAs,  NVMe Streamer utilizes Xilinx GTH and GTY Multi-Gigabit Transceivers together with Xilinx PCIe Hard IP Cores for physical PCIe connectivity.

• Provides one or more NVMe / PCIe host ports for NVMe SSD connectivity
• Full Acceleration means “CPU-less” operation
• Fully integrated and tested NVMe Host Controller IP Core
• PCIe Enumeration, NVMe Initialization & Identify, Queue Management
• Control & Status interface for IO commands and drive administration
• Approx. 50k LUTs and 170 BRAM tiles (for Xilinx UltraScale+)
• Compatible with PCIe Gen 1 (2.5 GT/sec), Gen 2 (5 GT/sec), Gen 3 (8 GT/sec), Gen 4 (16 GT/sec) speeds
• Scalable to PCIe x1, x2, x4, x8 lane

• High-speed analog and digital data acquisition
• Lossless and gapless recording of sensor data
• Automotive / Aerospace Data Logging
• Data streaming from SSDs
• Storage protocol offloading