Aldec FPGA-Based NVMe Storage Solutions Targets HPC Applications

Aldec, Inc. has launched a versatile and time-saving FPGA-based NVMe storage solution to aid in the development of HPC applications such as high frequency trading and ML.

The soution includes ompany’s TySOM embedded prototyping board and up to 8 high-bandwidth, low-latency FMC-NVMe daughter cards, and a reference design (including source files and binaries) allowing engineers to fast-track their projects.

FMC-NVMe daughter cards

“NVMe SSDs are very popular in a wide range of high-performance computing applications, as are FPGAs because of their ability to handle parallel processing, their speed and programmability, plus the fact MPSoC FPGAs also feature ARM processor cores,” comments Louie De Luna, director of marketing. “Our newest FPGA-based embedded solution is aimed at engineers developing systems that will combine the power and benefits of NVMe and FPGAs.“

The latest addition to the company’s range of FPGA mezzanine cards, the FMC-NVMe provides 4 NVMe interfaces. These are connected to a Microsemi PM8532 PCIe Switch, which provides a connection-to-carrier-card via the PCIe x8 GEN3 interface using a standard FMC connector. The FMC-NVMe daughter card supports board stacking (up to 8 deep – which means up to 32 NVMe SSDs slots are accessible).

TySOM-3A embedded prototyping board

Hardware setup of FPGA-based storage solution
For HPC application developers, the company has prepared a reference design that can be used with either its TySOM-3A-ZU19EG or TySOM-3-ZU7EV embedded development board. Both are based on Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC technology, which incorporates high-performance application processor (APU) with DDR4 system memory controller and a hardened configurable PCIe Gen3 blocks in the programmable logic part. These features enable the boards to implement a rich-featured Root Port of PCIe Root Complex solution to meet the underlying physical layer requirements of the NVMe protocol.

TySOM-3 embedded prototyping board

About TySOM
TySOM is a family of development boards for embedded applications that features Xilinx Zynq all programmable module combining FPGA with ARM Cortex processor. Plethora of included peripherals makes these boards useful in embedded applications like Automotive, IoT, Industrial automation or embedded HPC.

About Aldec
The firm, headquartered in Henderson, NV, is an industry provider in electronic design verification and offers a patented technology suite including: RTL design, RTL simulators, hardware-assisted verification, SoC and ASIC prototyping, design rule checking, CDC verification, IP cores, requirements lifecycle management, DO-254 functional verification and military/aerospace solutions.