Accelerator Functional Unit Developer Guide: Intel FPGA Programmable Acceleration Card N3000 Variants

ID 683190
Date 7/15/2022
Public
Document Table of Contents

3.2.4.4. 40G – 25G Gearbox

For 25 GbE operation, the Intel® Arria® 10 FPGA provides a gearbox that rate adjusts between the 25 GbE network interface and the Intel® Ethernet Controller XL710-BM2 NIC 40 GbE interface.

Received 25 GbE traffic is written into a per port 32 kB Intel® Arria® 10 FPGA FIFO. The FIFO data is read out on packet boundaries using a 40 GbE rate where an entire packet is transferred to the Intel® Ethernet Controller XL710-BM2 NIC. The Intel® Arria® 10 FPGA extends the interframe packet gap to the Intel® Ethernet Controller XL710-BM2 NIC such that the data rate is 40 Gb, however the number of packets transferred is determined by the number of packets received from the 25 GbE network port.

The Intel® Ethernet Controller XL710-BM2 NIC sends Ethernet traffic to the Intel® Arria® 10 FPGA over a 40 GbE path. The Intel® Arria® 10 FPGA buffers the 40 GbE traffic in a 32 kB packet-based FIFO. If the Intel® Arria® 10 FPGA FIFO exceeds half fill level, then the Intel® Arria® 10 FPGA asserts a backpressure external pin, signaling the Intel® Ethernet Controller XL710-BM2 NIC to extend the interframe packet gap. Once the Intel® Arria® 10 FPGA FIFO capacity drops to a quarter of capacity, then the backpressure external pin is de-asserted. This extended interframe packet gap reduces the packet rate such that the resulting data rate is 25 Gb. The backpressure signals are connected to the ccip_std_afu module. The Intel® Ethernet Controller XL710-BM2 NIC to Intel® Arria® 10 FPGA data flow is shown in this figure:
Figure 18. MAC TX DEMUX