FPGA-Based Systems With MicroTCA

February 5, 2025Application Notes, Methodologies400Gbps, Agilex 5, AMD, AMD Versal, Data Recording, Fast FPGA RAID, FFRAID, High-speed Data, MicroTCA, mTCA, PCIe 4.0, PCIe 5.0, SoM, Trenz

FPGA-Based Systems With MicroTCA

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Many FPGA-based systems projects are rather low volume and, therefore, favor off-the-shelf hardware over the costs and risks of custom hardware (PCB) design.
MicroTCA or mTCA or µTCA is a 20+ year old standard from PICMG for implementing embedded systems using off-the-shelf hardware. Most often MicroTCA is used for test & measurement or for scientific applications when application specific IOs and signals need to be processed where FPGAs provide the flexibility and processing performance.
However, as we will demonstrate in this Technical Brief, MicroTCA carries a huge baggage, and has little to no advantages over other approaches, namely FPGA based System-on-Modules or the “good old” PC architecture.

Table of Contents

FPGA-Based Systems With MicroTCA

FFRAID – A Fast FPGA RAID

February 4, 2025Application Notes, Storage400Gbps, AMD, AMD Alveo U55C, AMD U50, AMD V80, Data Decimation, Data Recording, High-speed Data, Indexing Metadata, Linux Soft-RAID, NVMe SSD RAID0, NVMe Streaming, PCIe 4.0, PCIe 5.0, RAID1, Security, TCG OPAL

FFRAID – A Fast FPGA RAID for High-Speed Data Acquisition

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In past MLE Technical Briefs (“Sustained, High-Speed Data Recording with NVMe SSDs” and “NVMe Streamer for High-Speed FPGA Data Acquisition & Recording” and customer success stories we have presented FPGA-based solutions for high-speed data acquisition. This Technical Brief is a sequel describing how FPGA-based data acquisition can be pushed to new limits using MLE FFRAID, a Fast FPGA RAID for NVMe SSDs.

Table of Contents

FFRAID – A Fast FPGA RAID for High-Speed Data Acquisition

Shift-Left Your FPGA Design Projects

January 22, 2024Application Notes, Methodologies4K Image Processing, High-speed Data, Network Acceleration, NPAP, SmartNIC, Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN), Trenz

Shift-Left Your FPGA Design Projects

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Summary

FPGA Full System Stacks comprising off-the-shelf FPGA System-on-Modules (SoM) plus pre-validated FPGA IP Cores and subsystems can greatly accelerate the time-to-market of your FPGA design project. Advantages of FPGA Full System Stacks include:

FPGA developers can rely on a tested and verified subsystem implementation. The concept of re-use increases design productivity while sharing the FPGA subsystem development costs and risks over many users.
Pre-validated FPGA IP-Cores and subsystems make clever use of the different FPGA resources to realize a cost/performance optimized domain-specific architecture.
Software is included in the form of kernel space device drivers, user-space programmer APIs, and sometimes even complete OS images, all nicely tuned for guaranteeing the overall system’s reliability and performance.

FPGA Full System Stacks from MLE are integrated with select FPGA SoMs from Trenz Electronics and are focused on applications such as:

Realiable, Low-Latency, High-Throughput Network Transports
High-Speed Data Acquisition
Augmented Stereo Computer Vision
High-Speed Data Record & Replay

We describe a design methodology using FPGA Full System Stacks and share our experiences from real customer designs.