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Altera_Forum
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9 years ago

Altera product for network traffic processing

Hello. Our company is interested in low-latency implementation of some application-level network protocols (say, FIX or FAST financial protocols and/or some other broker firm usages of fpga, e.g....
Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
9 years ago

Hi, I will try to answer some of the questions:

  1. Ethernet port on FPGA only product - you will need to instantiate an Ethernet MAC IP inside your design, and route the pins to the PHY. Thankfully there are design examples that already does that. Note however that you may need to upgrade the software stack beyond the example implementation that is provided (for example, in this link: https://cloud.altera.com/devstore/platform/15.0.0/nios-ii-simple-socket-server-ethernet-example/) - thus consider potential licensing needs.

  2. The MAC IP from Altera communicates to other IPs using the Avalon standard. You can connect other IPs such as DMA and Nios (soft processor)

  3. Meanwhile the Ethernet port connected to the SoC side of the chip (for boards that have them) uses Linux driver stack and are typically sufficient for most usage.

  4. Cyclone vs Arria - advantages of Arria include higher logic count, more embedded memory, faster transceivers --> it really depend on your design requirement. I suggest that you start working on the design in Quartus first (select the Cyclone for a start). If your design compiles and simulates successfully in Cyclone devices, you can then move on to get a board to try it out.