UDP Usage in FPGA

Abstract

FPGAs are frequently used in embedded systems thanks to their flexibility and parallel processing power. One usage of this flexibility is to design the TCP/IP stack elements inside the FPGA for their speed benefits. In this work, an IP block which provides communication between FPGA and user via "User Datagram Protocol (UDP)" is designed. This block can send and receive datagrams from a remote UDP socket. The analysis shows that up to 966 Mbit/s throughput can be reached using the design. This way, the Gigabit Ethernet interface of the embedded system can be used without consuming any microcontroller resource.