I normally avoid shop words or “corporate speak” because I feel it dehumanizes us, but sometimes these phrases are necessary. So here is the “30,000 foot” view. And please pardon the appearance of my flow charts and diagrams, I am not a graphic designer… All images open in a new tab, so just click on … Read more
I have wired up the components of my 10 Gigabit FPGA Accelerated Network card with great care, and I decided to have my “tester” application skip the lwIP stack and to pass the received packet directly to the host for testing/verification purposes. Everything was checking out fine, the LabVIEW code looked flawless, the interface to … Read more
The 10 Gigabit MAC/transceiver gives me 64 bit data words. I currently think I am giving and getting 64 bit data words, but I am really only using 32 bits. I came to this conclusion after I tried reading a 64 bit word and saw the data was simply two repeated 32 bit words. Additionally … Read more
I wired up the 10 gigabit ethernet MAC to my MicroBlaze instance to my host computer and compiled/synthesized everything. I then turn on my “quiet” PXIe-1062Q and fire up my tester application and it did not work… I open up an isolated tester – “Fpga-Mac-Top.vi”, and it worked. I open up the isolated MicroBlaze tester … Read more
Ever since I started developing this LabVIEW FPGA project that uses a MicroBlaze soft processor to process TCP streams, I have learned a lot and can comment on the pros and cons of using LabVIEW FPGA vs using a traditional Xilinx/Altera based FPGA development approach. For starters, LabVIEW FPGA blows every single other FPGA development … Read more
So here is the most simple, FPGA-based Network Interface Card that I know of. This application will start Port 0 of the 10 Gigabit Network interface that is provided by the PXIe-6592R (http://www.ni.com/en-us/support/model.pxie-6592.html) board by National Instruments, and will allow you to do any of the following: Check if any new ethernet frames have been received, and … Read more
I finished writing an application that exercises the first Port of the 10 Gigabit Ethernet Interface that is provided with the National Instruments PXIe-6592R board and as I started taking manual screenshots via the LabVIEW “File->Print” option I began to ponder, can this be done more easily? Or dare I say it “programmatically”? The LabVIEW … Read more
I am getting real close to finishing my proof-of-concept FPGA-based network card that is based on the PXIe-6592 National Instruments Board which uses the Kinex-7 410t FPGA chip by Xilinx, and has 2GB of DDR3 RAM. Using the Arty Arix board, I was able to make sure that the MicroBlaze code running the lwIP TCP/IP … Read more
What is the product of 0x9D0BF6FDAC70AB52 and 0x6408F6540A1384CB? Well, according to LabVIEW for Windows, the answer is 0x2D90DE07C0C42206. According to C++ on OSX (without any optimizations, usage of Intel Intrinsic functions), the answer is also 0x2D90DE07C0C42206. The real answer is… 0x3D5E2BF7DCBCA6622D90DE07C0C42206. How do you get this number? You have to use compiler intrinsics, or calculate this value … Read more
So I wanted to implement a simple, stripped down version of the open-source lightweight IP stack “lwIP” (https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/lwip/) inside my LabVIEW FPGA project that I can handle TCP and UDP data streams. I do not have a lot of experience with this, and I found that building such a project inside Vivado would take around … Read more