Title: NetFPGA: A platform for building extensible networks with 
reconfigurable hardware

  Authors: John W. Lockwood and Nick McKeown      Stanford University

  Hardware-accelerated network switches and routers enabled
rapid growth of the Internet.  Integrated circuits were built
to process Ethernet frames and Internet packets at high speeds
using optimized datapaths implement in
  In the past, commercial vendors built their own Application 
Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) to process network data at 
Gigabit/second rates.  Going forward, we envison wide use of 
Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) because of their 
increasingly high densities and lower Non-Recurring Engineering 
(NRE) cost.

  In order to help students and researchers learn how to implement 
networking functions in hardware, we have build an open platform 
called the NetFPGA.  The NetFPGA platform enables students and 
researchers to rapidly prototype high-performance networking 
systems in hardware. A new version of the NetFPGA platform has 
been developed and is now available for use by the academic 
community.

  Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) logic is used to
implement the core data processing functions while software
running on embedded cores within the FPGA and/or
programs running on an attached host computer implement
only control functions. Reference designs and component
libraries have been developed for graduate courses at Stanford 
University. Open-source Verilog code is available for download 
from the project website.