Controller for Network Interface Card on FPGA

Abstract

The continuing advances in the performance of network servers make it essential for network interface cards (NICs) to provide more sophisticated services and data processing. Modern network interfaces provide fixed functionality and are optimized for sending and receiving large packets. Network interface cards allow the operating system to send and receive packets through the main memory to the network. The operating system stores and retrieves data from the main memory and communicates with the NIC over the local interconnect, usually a peripheral component interconnect bus (PCI). Most NICs have a PCI hardware interface to the host server, use a device driver to communicate with the operating system and use local receive and transmit storage buffers. NICs typically have a direct memory access (DMA) engine to transfer data between host memory and the network interface memory. In addition, NICs include a medium access control (MAC) unit to implement the link level protocol for the underlying network such as Ethernet, and use a signal processing hardware to implement the physical (PHY) layer defined in the network. To execute and synchronize the above operations NICs also contents controller whose architecture is customized for network data transfer. In this paper we present the architecture of application specific controller that can be used in NICs.