News Briefs - Networking:

Nallatech Brings Supercomputer Performance To Network Apps

Nallatech, Inc. introduced the BenNUEY-PCI-4E, a full-length, FPGA-based PCI board with supercomputer-level performance for network processing applications. The BenNUEY-PCI-4E is based on Nallatech's DIME-II high speed computing architecture to accelerate computationally intensive applications such as intrusion detection, content processing and encryption.

The BenNUEY-PCI-4E can host up to four Xilinx Virtex-II Pro FPGAs and features four Gigabit Ethernet ports, a 64-bit/33Mhz PCI interface and four RocketIO channels for inter-card communications. Through this feature set board provides the industry's highest commercially available performance density for networking applications.

By providing a fully integrated PCI interface Nallatech simplifies connection to a host PC. This frees the four Ethernet ports on the BenNUEY-PCI-4E to provide the connectivity which makes the card ideal for developing and deploying high-performance network applications, such as real time packet inspection or the encryption and decryption of streamed data. The four RocketIO channels provide an alternative high-bandwidth data path for accessing the BenNUEY-PCI-4E architecture.

Up to three DIME-II expansion modules can be supported on the BenNUEY-PCI-4E. This expansion capability offers designers maximum performance and flexibility when specifying their system. For example, a platform with three BenDATA-II modules populated on the BenNUEY-PCI-4E delivers 30 million logic gates, 3/4GBytes of DDR SDRAM, over 50Mbytes of ZBT SRAM and more than 40Gbps off- card bandwidth. In such systems, implementing designs across multiple FPGAs is made easy by the highly parallel DIME-II architecture.

The BenNUEY-PCI-4E comes with a set of optimized 10/100/1000 Ethernet MAC cores smoothing the design path. Cores are deployed in the Virtex-II Pro FPGA and interface via an external Quad PHY device to four RJ45 ports at no additional cost. These cores have been extensively tested on the BenNUEY-PCI- 4E. For maximum flexibility, the cores are delivered as netlists and can be omitted by users wishing to develop their own MAC layer.

The BenNUEY-PCI-4E supports industry-standard interfaces simplifying system design, ensuring easy communication with and integration to existing systems. As with all Nallatech products, support exists for multiple design flows including HDL, Xilinx System Generator, Accelchip and Handel-C. Run-time processing capability is available with Nallatech FUSE and DIMEtalk software. Standard software development environments are supported through FUSE APIs for C++, Matlab and Java toolboxes.

The BenNuey-PCI-4E is available now at a starting price of $8,792.