Pipeline Automation Framework for Reusable High-throughput Network Applications on FPGA
By Jean Bruant 1,2, Pierre-Henri Horrein 1, Olivier Muller 2, Frédéric Pétrot 2
1 OVHcloud
2 Univ.Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, Grenoble INP1, TIMA, France

Abstract
In a context of ever-growing worldwide communication traffic, cloud service providers aim at deploying scalable infrastructures to address heterogeneous needs. Part of the network infrastructure, FPGAs are tailored to guarantee low-latency and high-throughput packet processing. However, slowness of the hardware design process impairs FPGA ability to be part of an agile infrastructure under constant evolution, from incident response to long-term transformation. Deploying and maintaining network functionalities across a wide variety of FPGAs raises the need to fine-tune hardware designs for several FPGA targets. To address this issue, we introduce PAF, an open-source architectural parameterization framework based on a pipeline-oriented design methodology. PAF (Pipeline Automation Framework) implementation is based on Chisel, a Scala-embedded Hardware Construction Language (HCL), that we leverage to interface with circuit elaboration. Applied to industrial network packet classification systems, PAF demonstrates efficient parameterization abilities, enabling to reuse and optimize the same pipelined design on several FPGAs. In addition, PAF focuses the pipeline description on the architectural intent, incidentally reducing the number of lines of code to express complex functionalities. Finally, PAF confirms that automation does not imply any loss of tight control on the architecture by achieving on par performance and resource usage with equivalent exhaustively described implementations.
To read the full article, click here
Related Semiconductor IP
- NPU IP
- JPEG XL Encoder
- I2C Master/Slave Controller Core
- NVMe Validation Test Suite
- Hybrid Memory Cube Verification IP
Related Articles
- HyNoC: A Hybrid Circuit-Switch/Wormhole Network-on-Chip for Distributed VLIW Computing on FPGA
- Survey of Chip Designers on the Value of Formal Verification Across the Spectrum of Applications
- A 24 Processors System on Chip FPGA Design with Network on Chip
- System on Modules (SOM) and its end-to-end verification using Test Automation framework
Latest Articles
- Terracotta: Enabling the Adoption of New DRAM Techniques via a Flexible DRAM Interface and Memory Controller
- A Framework for Accelerating Transformer Inference on RISC-V for Edge AI
- An Interleaved Parallel Dependent Quantization Hardware Architecture for H.266/VVC
- A Formal Security Analysis of CAN XL
- A Secure dToF LiDAR SoC with Dual-Domain Fingerprinting and Event-Driven AFE Circuit Achieving Sensor-Level Attack Resilience