If you purchase the National Instruments PXIe-6592R Board, retailing at $12,197.00 USD, I guarantee that you can run an FPGA accelerated 10 Gigabit network card in as much time as it takes for you to synthesize your code! Call Now, the number is 1-900-XXX-YYYY.
Batteries not included, strings attached. But seriously, I have just cleaned up the code and was able to run this from its new home, namely a brand new directory inside my kitchen sink of LabVIEW samples.
Download the source code and take a look at it here:
https://github.com/JohnStratoudakis/LabVIEW_Fpga/tree/master/07_10_Gigabit/02_FPGANic
You can take a look at the MicroBlaze design, you can look at the MicroBlaze C++ code, or you can look at the LabVIEW code. I removed all of the other vi’s that are not needed for this specific example, so browsing this code should be easy.
Please note however, that this project is what I will slowly morph to have a TCP/IP stack implemented inside the FPGA MicroBlaze and not a pseudo TCP/IP stack in software.
Additionally, only Windows drivers are available for use for this specific board developed (again) by National Instruments. I have successfully (and legally) engineered my own device drivers for other boards in the past from NI. You too can write your own drivers to port this to Linux or IBM or whatever hardware platform of your choice. However, in order to do this you would have to spend a certain amount of $ on hardware, or be really good at convincing people to give you things…
Finally, to run this code, you would need the following installed on your system:
- LabVIEW 2017 (32-bit)
- (Do not download the 64-bit version!)
- http://www.ni.com/download/labview-development-system-2017/6679/en/
- LabVIEW FPGA 2017
- LabVIEW FPGA Module Xilinx Compilation Tool for Vivado 2015.4
- Xilinx SDK 2015.4
And that’s it! Oh, and you would also need a PXIe chassis to house this board, but if you order one of these boards your sales representative will recommend one for you. I went real cheap and got a used PXIe-1062Q for around 750$. And the Q stands for “quiet”, and believe me, it is not quiet at all, so imagine how loud the normal version is! (Remember, this hardware is usually military hard and capable of running on things like airplanes, satellites, Humvees in the desert, so the noise it makes it most definitely acceptable, but don’t expect to meditate with this thing on)
Addendum:
NI Week is coming up fast, this means a new version of LabVIEW and LabVIEW FPGA will be available for download sometime in May of 2018. This means we may get a nice upgrade to be able to use this board with a later version of the Xilinx Vivado Tools. So stay tuned and check out www.ni.com/niweek for more information!