Picking The Right Granularity When Buffering PCIe/NVMe Data

December 15, 2021FPGA DevTips, Storage AccelerationAMD/Xilinx ZCU106, BRAM, DRAM, HBM2, High Bandwidth Memory (HBM2), Memory Combination, PCI Express

Picking The Right Granularity When Buffering PCIe/NVMe Data Table of ContentsPicking The Right Granularity When Buffering PCIe/NVMe DataBlockRAM (BRAM)UltraRAM (URAM)DDRx DRAMHigh Bandwidth Memory (HBM2)Conclusion Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) is an interface specification often used with PCIe. Its goal is to leverage the parallelism and low latency of modern SSDs. A typical PCIe payload data transfer happens in data chunks of either 128 Byte or 256 Byte. SSDs deploy several tricks (wear leveling, SLC to TLC conversion) to enhance the read and write speeds as well as their lifespan. One downside is that their read and write speed is not constant over a long write/read period which might result in backpressure. Some applications do not support back pressure that can lead to an erroneous state if one employs a standard SSD system. One possible mitigation strategy is to have an elastic buffer between the SSD and the data source. Using an FPGA, there are different possibilities to implement an elastic buffer. At MLE, we investigated BlockRAM (BRAM), UltraRAM (URAM), Dynamic RAM (DRAM) and the second generation of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM2). Each memory technology has its advantages and disadvantages regarding its capabilities to handle different data chunk sizes. We will present our findings below. BlockRAM (BRAM) BRAM is a RAM module which can

PCIe Non-Transparent Bridging (PCIe NTB)

April 24, 2019Application Notes, MethodologiesPCI Express, PCIe Non-Transparent Bridging (NTB)

Tool Options When Debugging an FPGA-based PCIe NTB Used in an ECU for Autonomous Driving

TB20190424

We share our findings and experiences when debugging an FPGA-based PCIe Non-Transparent Bridge (PCIe NTB) used in an Electronic Control Unit (ECU) for Autonomous Vehicles. After explaining key inner workings of PCIe and PCIe Non-Transparent Bridge we discuss debugging using embedded logic analyzers (Xilinx ChipScope / ILA), RTL Simulators (XSim from the Xilinx Vivado toolsuite as well as Questa Prime from Mentor Graphics) plus Visualizer, also from Mentor Graphics. We hope that you find this useful when you are preparing to debug your next FPGA project.

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