Nallatech completes first customer shipment of 10Gb Ethernet PCI Express FPGA accelerator card

USA: Nallatech, a leading supplier of high-performance COTS FPGA solutions, recently announced the first customer shipment of the PCIe-180, a low profile PCI Express FPGA accelerator card featuring a 10Gb Ethernet interface directly coupled to a Xilinx FPGA.

The PCIe-180 is the latest product to be introduced to Nallatech’s highly successful Embedded PCI Series of FPGA COTS solutions and is targeted at Signal Intelligence, Network Security and Algorithm Acceleration applications.

The PCIe-180 features an onboard Xilinx Virtex-5 user FPGA directly coupled to a high bandwidth, flexible memory configuration that includes ECC and parity protection. Five independent banks of DDR-II SRAM provide up to 10GBytes/sec of sustained, random access memory bandwidth.

A single bank of DDR2 SDRAM memory provides 4GBytes/sec of deep storage local to the user FPGA. The PCIe-180 is tightly integrated to the Host platform via an 8-lane PCI Express connection supporting sustained bandwidths of up to 2.2GBytes/sec. Optimized VHDL memory controller IP cores and reference designs are included as part of the standard product deliverables along with driver and API source code for 64-bit Linux operating systems.

“The adoption of 10Gb Ethernet is well underway,” said Craig Petrie, Product Manager at Nallatech. “The increased bandwidths associated with 10GbE offer many benefits, but also present new challenges for customers trying to process and manage this torrent of data in real time. The PCIe-180 will allow customers to use the Xilinx FPGA and associated external memory as an effective, low power data-centric processing engine.“

The PCIe-180 is the only accelerator card of this class to comply with the “low profile” half height, half length PCI Express mechanical specification. This enables compatibility with almost all high density server and blade centre platforms from leading OEMs such as HP, IBM, DELL, CRAY and SGI. Depending upon configuration, pricing for the PCIe-180 starts at $2,995 in volume production.