Title :
Groundhog - A Serial ATA Host Bus Adapter (HBA) for FPGAs
Author :
Woods, Louis ; Eguro, Ken
Author_Institution :
Syst. Group, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
fDate :
April 29 2012-May 1 2012
Abstract :
This paper describes Groundhog, an open-source SATA host bus adapter (HBA) for FPGAs. This system makes it easy for FPGA-based applications to directly interact with permanent storage devices. This allows reconfigurable computing devices to be used in new applications that require bulk storage and presents additional opportunities to increase performance, reduce power consumption and improve system integration. In addition to standard disk sector read/write commands, this framework also supports more advanced concepts such as native command queuing (NCQ) introduced with SATA II. We test the system with latest-generation SSDs and demonstrate the potential performance advantages and trade-offs of direct hardware access to bulk storage devices.
Keywords :
field programmable gate arrays; FPGA-based applications; HBA; NCQ; SATA II; SSD; bulk storage devices; direct hardware access; groundhog; native command queuing; permanent storage devices; power consumption reduction; reconfigurable computing devices; serial ATA host bus adapter; standard disk sector read-write commands; system integration improvement; Field programmable gate arrays; Open source software; Performance evaluation; Protocols; Registers; Throughput; Transceivers; FPGA; I/O; SATA; Virtex-5; Xilinx; open-source;
Conference_Titel :
Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines (FCCM), 2012 IEEE 20th Annual International Symposium on
Conference_Location :
Toronto, ON
Print_ISBN :
978-1-4673-1605-7
DOI :
10.1109/FCCM.2012.45