SGA-10GED

There are several fields of industry where accurate network traffic monitoring and inspection is a key factor of success. Participants of these areas realized the importance of fast packet processing, reliable data handling and security, consequently a new demand arose for devices being able to satisfy these needs. AITIA also recognized this newly born market demand and found the optimal solution for the problem in its highly flexible, reconfigurable and fast FPGA-based SGA interface cards.

Lord of The Boards

AITIA’s cards can be programmed to solve all the problems of companies mentioned above. The user-defined logic running on the FPGA can realize a wide range of networks applications such as firewalls, different layer routers or switches, traffic generators or analyzers etc. The technological development goes along with an increase in bandwidth and data rate requirements, thus network devices have to face quickly growing load (up-to 10 Gb/s per connection) of the so-called next generation networks (NGN). AITIA’s solution for handling NGN infrastructure is the SGA10GED interface card. Compared to competitors, AITIA’s leading-edge card offers ultra high speed data processing and transfer rates supported by its Virtex 5 FPGA core chip, its x8 PCI-E slot and two XFP slots.

Technical Description - Welcome on 10GED Board

The main part of every interface card is the core FPGA. It has to ensure the performance and control the different interfaces attached to the device. AITIA’s choice of FPGA includes the following parts: Built-in FPGA components:

  • 1 PCI Express Endpoint Controller
  • 4 Tri-mode (10/100/1000) Ethernet Media Access Controller (MAC)
  • 2 Internal Configuration Access Ports (ICAP)
AITIA offers customers the freedom to customize their card designing a board that can accept two types of the powerful Virtex 5 chips:
  • XC5VLX110T (for SGA10GD board)
  • XC5VLX50T (for SGA10GDL board)

Card Components

  • PCI Express endpoint connector with 100 MHz clock reference driving x1, x4 and x8 gigabit lanes at 2.5 Gb/s each
  • Dual XFPs with 156.25 MHz clock reference to support user-installed 10 Gb/s Ethernet modules
  • 200-pin, small-outline dual in-line DDR2 SODIMM memory module receptacle accommodating 128MB, 256MB, or 512 MB modules
  • 40 pin BERG type Feature Connector
  • Xilinx PROM FLASH Platform to reconfigure FPGA
  • Status LEDs

Applications

Besides the firmware AITIA also offers sample applications to help developers create their own codes.

  • Ultra high speed (up-to 10 Gb/s ) Ethernet network traffic analysis
  • Network testing, maintenance
  • Firewall, routing functions
  • Traffic generator

Features

AITIA is aware that strong hardware components do not guarantee strong performance on their own. For this reason the company aims to provide costumers strong hardware support as well. The cards are shipped with pre-installed firmware which includes several useful networking functions listed above:

  • 64 bit Timestamp with 4 or 8 nsec resolution
  • Lossless packet capture limited only by host PC's speed and resources
  • Header-only capture: configurable protocol layer depth decoded by hardware on the fly
  • Fully PCAP/WINPCAP compliant interface (fe. wireshark integration)
  • Parameterized line speed capable packet/flow generator for active measurements

SGA-10GED Architecture