Hardware Block Diagram

PCIe NIC Card Features

• PCIe Gen3 x16 Host Interface
• 2 x 100GbE QSFP-DD Cages
• 254mm x 111.15mm, 3/4 Length, Full Height, Dual Slot with Active Cooling PCIe Card
• Quad/Dual Arm Cortex-A53 @1.5GHz, Dual Cortex-R5 @600MHz
• Up to 1143K Logic cells & 522K LUTs in FPGA programming logic.

• PS: 64bit, 8GB DDR4 RAM with ECC expandable up to 32GB
• PL: Dual 64bit, 8GB DDR4 RAM expandable up to 16GB
• 8GB eMMC Flash for Boot & OS storage expandable up to 128GB
• Micro SD Slot

Block Design

OpenNIC Design Feature

• Packet size 64 – 9600 bytes
• Line rate 2 × 100 Gbps/ 140 Mpps traffic burst (Packet size of 64 bytes),  PCIe Gen3
• Supported IPs are QDMA, CMAC, Packet Adapter, System Management Wizard, Clock Wizard
• Two User Logic Box of 250 MHz QDMA – Packet Adapter, 322MHz Packet Adpater – QDMA

• DMA engines operate based on the descriptors.
• PS based solutions
• RTL plugins for AXI-lite interface and AXI4-stream interfaces.
• Temperature – Voltage Monitor and control data transfer to SmartNIC.

DPDK

DPDK (Data Plane Development Kit) with its user space drivers, PMD, and optimized libraries increases the performance

DPDK Software

Feature

• Link status, speed and duplex configuration
• Promiscuous mode
• MTU update
• Jumbo frame
• Flow control
• Unicast MAC filter
• Fast mbuf free
• Timestamp offload and PTP TimeSync
• VLAN filter
• SR-IOV

Platform, Drivers and Applications

• OS and Supported Applications
• Operating System : Linux ( RHEL8 OS, Ubuntu )
• Base application : DPDK, Python, Meson, Ninja
• Packet Generation : Pktgen-DPDK, TRex
• Packet Capture : Tcpdump & libpcap
• Software drivers :
  (a) For an IOMMU enabled device : VFIO – PCI
  (b) For legacy interrupts : IGB-UIO

NIC standards

• IEEE 802.3 100G Ethernet

Design

• L2 / L3 forward QoS framework
• Packet Generation
• IP Pipeline for flow classification / firewall / routing / segmentation / reassembly
• ACL – Access Control List
• management- Server / VMs
• Virtio-IO support for VMs/Containers/Dockers
• OpenVSwitch
• Crypto Framework
• IP-Sec Gateway

Use cases

Traffic Generator
Generate and manage network traffic with high throughput and low latency

Network Storage
Intelligent Storage Controller for an advanced capabilities in data processing.

Network Accelerator
Offload and accelerate a wide range of networking functions

Network Security
Fortifies network defenses and ensures the integrity, confidentiality, and availability of critical data and resources

Cloud and Data Center
Virtualization, data processing, Network management, security

Packet Forward
 Traffic Steering, Load balancing, Traffic filtering