Flash Memory Summit: PLDA Showcased vDMA IP Core

PLDA announced their vDMA IP Core, an efficient many-channel DMA engine specifically engineered for SoCs that power tomorrow’s virtualized data centers.

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The company has demonstrated this technology at Flash Memory Summit 2017.

vDMA IP Core is based on a novel architecture that allows thousands of independent and concurrent DMA channels to be distributed among a number of VMs (without sacrificing throughput), latency, or resource utilization. Additionally, it incorporates the data protection and security features required by enterprise storage and networking applications.

The exponential traffic growth in data centers and the convergence of compute, storage, and network fabric within virtualized systems requires the development of SoCs that implement DMA engines that can move data efficiently between a large number of VMs. The traditional DMA architecture is limited, however, as it replicates resources for each DMA channel, leading to a high gate count, and typically does not implement the data security and VM isolation features required in today’s data center environments.

The vDMA IP Core solves these issues by providing the scalability required to support thousands of DMA channels and hundreds of VMs, without compromising on performance or resource utilization. This provides benefits for SoCs targeted at virtualized data center applications, such as multi-core and many-core network and flow processors, Smart NICs, NVMe and other storage controllers.

Main features of vDMA IP Core include:

• Up to 2,048 dynamically reconfigurable DMA channels

• Up to 512 VMs

• Up to 128 read and write requests

• Data path and Context memory protected with CRC and Parity bits

• VM Isolation enforced with sideband signaling for identification and access control

According to Arnaud Schleich, CEO, PLDA, “PLDA’s vDMA IP core will enable our data center SoC designers to build devices that take advantage of virtualization more efficiently. This new DMA architecture will empower data centers to move even more data, with better performance and improved QoSs, for the benefit of cloud users everywhere“.