February 7, 2018 -- Aldec, Inc., a pioneer in mixed-HDL language simulation and hardware-assisted verification for ASIC and FPGA designs, has paired two of its embedded development products to create a solution ideal for network and IT engineers in need of high traffic, reprogrammable data routers and switches.

The solution comprises an Aldec TySOM-2A-7Z030 embedded development board (which features a Xilinx® Zynq™ 7000 SoC FPGA) and an Aldec FMC-NET daughter card.

“Because of the huge amount of data that people now generate, combined with the wealth of communication protocols - such as Wi-Fi, Ethernet, USB, SFP and QSFP – there is a growing need for high-performance, hardware re-programmable routers,” says Louie De Luna, Aldec’s Director of Marketing. “However, you need to have an ideal marriage between decision-making, i.e. traditional processing power, and FPGA-based hardware acceleration, which is why the Xilinx® Zynq™ 7000 with its embedded ARM core is the perfect choice.”

Together, the TySOM board and FMC-NET daughter card provide two Wi-Fi/Bluetooth channels, six Ethernet connectors, one QSFP+ connector, four SATA connectors, and four USB connectors. Here, the QSFP+ connectors can be used for high speed data transactions (such as transferring data between a server and a network using optical fiber), the SATA connectors can be used for adding traditional hard drives and/or SSDs to the network, the USB ports can be used to connect external devices such as Hard Drives and printers to the network, and Ethernet interfaces can be used to connect security/internet camera, PCs or laptops.

The TySOM-2A is a compact prototyping board containing mid-range Zynq-7000 module (Z-7030). It is designed to assure flexibility in selecting peripherals due to leveraging the larger chip package (FFG676) with 250 I/O and 4 GTX transceivers and providing one FMC-HPC connector that enables use of expansion daughter cards; such as the FMC-NET.

 Standard peripherals like DDR3 RAM, USB and HDMI used by ARM CPU Processing System are contained in that board so the Linux OS or another Real Time Operating System (RTOS) can be booted out of the box without any additional hardware components. The OS and software executed by ARM Cortex CPU have 1GB of DDR3 RAM for their disposal and can use up to 32GB of SSD storage in Micro-SD card.

Aldec’s FPGA-based Networking Solution is now available for shipping and includes the following components:

• TySOM-2A-7Z030 board
• FMC-NET daughter card
• Board technical documentation and tutorials
• OpenWrt reference design image and source code
• (Optional) Riviera-PRO Advanced RTL Simulation/Debugging Platform