How To: Easily Control & Monitor Your Design Over Ethernet

Problem:

You’re developing a great SoC or FPGA design, and need an easy, equally great way to communicate with it from your PC.

The board does have an Ethernet port. But you don’t want to mess with embedded software networking stacks, because this might impact software performance, or maybe you don’t have processor cycles available to run it. Plus, your deadline is rapidly approaching and you really don’t need a whole new side project.

Solution:

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

The UDPIP-40G 40G UDP/IP Hardware Protocol Stack implements a UDP/IP hardware protocol stack that enables high-speed communication over a LAN or a point-to-point connection. Designed for standalone operation, the core is ideal for offloading the host processor from the demanding task of UDP/IP encapsulation and enables media streaming with speeds up to 40Gbps even in processor-less SoC designs.

With its optional NetCMD module, the UDP/IP core will “translate” UDP packets of special syntax to AXI-Lite (or Avalon-MM) read or write accesses in its AXI-Lite 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 and Xilinx 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. You would just need to connect its control register interface to your bus, or if this seems difficult, we can hardwire its configuration for you.

The network configuration is also straightforward. The UDP/IP core implements 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).