NetStorageFPGA—A prototyping platform for building high-performance transmission and storage systems using Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) hardware

A wide range of applications require high-speed access to mass-storage devices with cost-effective standard interfaces, such as gigabit Ethernet and Serial-ATA (SATA). Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA), which features expansibility, parallel processing and in-system programmability, has the opportunity to build high-performance hardware accelerators with Tbytes for data acquisition system. Our approach, named NetStorageFPGA, introduces a prototyping platform with four gigabit Ethernet ports, three SATA connectors and PCI Express x1 interface. The FPGA on the platform directly handles all data-path switching, routing, and processing of Ethernet and SATA packets. The experimental result shows that the maximal sustained orderly data transfer rate is up to 118 MB/s per channel. In addition, we adopt the digital synchronous clock (DSC) function for data acquisition. The synchronization with time interval error (TIE) jitter root-mean-square (RMS) of 32.38 ns is achieved.