Packet Mover
Silicom’s PacketMover solution is an FPGA framework designed to simplify development and integration of the high-performance/high-flexibility applications and pure-compute tasks that are impossible to create without the use of FPGA, such as heavy computational offload functions, acceleration and networking applications up to 100GE. Typical tasks include compression/de-compression, encryption/ decryption, data slicing and Deep Packet Inspection (RegEx). PacketMover’s design makes it applicable for both inline and monitoring solutions.
For satellite communications and automotive use cases, the FPGA card functions as a high-performance bridge between a continuous stream of video data, control data and host computer memory. The pain point in all cases is the poor performance of systems that use software and standard NICs (PCIe DMA or similar), whose header overhead is a huge burden for the software. Silicom solves this problem by inserting smart algorithms into the FPGA and then encapsulating them using the Silicoms Packet Mover platform. Other functions like CODEC compression/decompression and access control-based security are also part of these solutions, all nicely encapsulated in the Packet Mover within the FPGA. Due to these acceleration processes carried out within the FPGA, users are able to achieve 100G line-rate performance in their systems. The use of PacketMover minimizes development time required for customizations for these types of solutions, reducing development effort compared to the use of standard FPGA tools.
