Rx Stack Accelerator for 10 GbE Integrated NIC

Abstract

The miniaturization of CMOS technology has reached a scale at which server processors are starting to integrate multi-gigabit network interface controllers (NIC). While transistors are becoming cheap and abundant in solid-state circuits, they remain at a premium on a processor die if they do not contribute to increase the number of cores and caches. Therefore, an integrated NIC (iNIC) must provide high networking performance under high logic density and low power dissipation. This paper describes the design of an integrated accelerator to offload computation-intensive protocol-processing tasks. The accelerator combines the concepts of the transport-triggered architecture with a programmable finite-state machine to deliver high instruction-level parallelism, efficient multiway branching and flexibility. The flexibility is key to adapt to protocol changes and address new applications. This accelerator was used in the construction of a 10 GbE iNIC in 45-nm CMOS technology. The ratio of performance (15 Mfps - 20 Gb/s Tput per port) to area (0.7 mm2) and the power consumption (0.15 W) of this accelerator were core enablers for constructing a processor compute complex with four iNICs.