FROM EDN EUROPE: Accelerate packet processing

Systems for processing packet-based data on the fly have, until recently, largely concentrated on packet routing: You look at the packet header; perform an algorithm, such as a look-up-table operation, on the content of the header; and set up the appropriate route for that packet with the minimum possible latency. Increasingly, you need to inspect and make decisions based on the content of the packets—hence the term "content processing.

In addition to providing routing information, you may need to determine, for example, the rights a packet has to access a service or to be transmitted with a given guaranteed latency. For security reasons, you may need to determine whether the content of a packet is legitimate. It is better to, say, detect and quarantine a virus before it reaches a target system than to deal with it when it has arrived. A complex relationship may exist between the quality-of-service parameters that a system requests and the billing data that it must generate, and it must perform all of this processing at line speed.

To serve this sector, Tarari has introduced a content-processor-development kit that combines hardware- and software-building blocks that support the creation of dynamically reprogrammable systems. The company based the hardware on Xilinx (www.xilinx.com) Virtex FPGAs; in effect, the kit helps you develop a hardware accelerator that is specific to the algorithm you need to perform and that you can dynamically reprogram to handle different algorithms or to adapt to changing tasks.

Tarari built the hardware on a PCI card that carries 4 million gates of reprogrammable logic and 256 Mbytes of DDR SDRAM; it also supports development under Windows and Linux. You develop code for the hardware platform using Celoxica's DK1 software, which builds the FPGA configuration code to directly implement your algorithm in hardware for maximum speed. Tarari intends to support a number of other disciplines in addition to network-content processing, which need fast, on-the-fly processing and easy reprogrammability for changing application demands.

Tarari, +1 858 385 5131, www.tarari.com.

Celoxica, +44 1235 863648, www.celoxica.com.