How To: Easily Control & Monitor Your Design Over Ethernet

Problem:

You are doing this pretty cool FPGA design, but you do not have an equally cool way of monitoring or controlling it during debug or run-time in the field. You would like to be able to use the Ethernet port of your board to connect it to a standard network and from their to your PC (wherever this might physically be), and use this connection to exchange data with your design (e.g. to get its status, modify its configuration, upload new firmware etc), with the least intrusive way possible. You would also like to avoid dealing with embedded software networking stacks, either because this would mess up your embedded software and its performance, or just because there is no processor in your design available for this purpose. Finally, your deadline is approaching rapidly, so you can really afford to waste time on this… So, how do you deal with this one?

Solution:

Just connect one of our UDP/IP core between the Ethernet MAC and your design, and easily implement a UDP-to-AXI-lite (or Avalon-MM) bridge.

The UDPIP-1G UDP/IP Hardware Protocol Stack, and its 10G/25G, 40G and 100G counterparts, implement UDP/IP hardware protocol stacks that enable high-speed communication over a LAN or a point-to-point connection. Designed for standalone operation, these cores are ideal for offloading the host processor from the demanding task of UDP/IP encapsulation and enables media streaming with speeds up to 100Gbps even in processor-less SoC designs.

With thei optional NetCMD module, the UDP/IP cores will “translate” UDP packets of special syntax to AXI-Lite (or Avalon-MM) read or write accesses in their bus-master port facing your design. For read accesses, the NetCMD module will return specially formed UDP packets containing the read data.

To make things simpler, NetCMD is delivered with a set of scripts and software utilities that form and parse the special UDP packets, and allow you to work with a simple text editor and a straightforward syntax (see the figure).

System integration is equally easy: we will deliver a wrapper that integrates the UDP/IP core and the Ethernet MAC of your choice. (We have off-the-shelf wrappers for Altera, AMD and Lattice eMACs, and we can put one in place for any other Ethernet MAC).

If you only need the eMAC or the UDP/IP core for communication, rest assured that they will not mess up your system design. The UDPIP core would pass any non-UDP traffic to your system via an AXI-Stream interface.

The network configuration is also straightforward. The UDP/IP cores implement DHCP, ARP,  so all you have to do is assign it an IP address in your network domain, and you are done.

Our customers have been using this exact approach to simplify debugging or to enable run-time monitoring and control of their products in all kinds of designs, from Video Over IP devices, to simple IoT sensors. Learn more about this by visiting the UDPIP product page, email us or submit a Request Info form, or call any time (+1 201.391.8300).