Designing communication systems today, you are often faced with a set of complex requirements that are not supported by ASSPs on the market. The flexibility of FPGAs can overcome those challenges but the cost is often a long design time and difficulty in meeting performance and cost constraints.

To some extent you can overcome the long design time by using available switching IP but they often come in fixed configurations and do not easily support adding new features.

Packet Architects is addressing these challenges on two fronts with our FlexSwitch technology. First, FlexSwitch is based on a switch architecture that is unique in that it is designed from the ground up to be configurable in terms of ports and bandwidth. With FlexSwitch it is possible to create efficient solutions for a broad range of performance requirements with little effort.

The second challenge is to adapt the forwarding functionality and packet processing to custom requirements. This challange is met using a forwarding program defined in a custom, C-like, high level language, and an in-house high level synthesis flow. This makes it possible to define new forwarding functions very quickly, and have them synthesized to area and timing optimized RTL.

The FlexSwitch Advantage

Key Feature	Advantage	Competitors
Flexible port speeds: from 10Mbit to 100Gbit.	Enables all port speeds and mix thereof. Future proof for higher port speeds.	Fixed structure which allows only certain port speeds.
High level synthesis (HLS) tool for easy packet processing description.	Enables customer to easily customize their packet processing for their application.	Fixed packet processing.
Flexible number of ports.	Design size scales with number of ports.	Fixed port configurations, design pays a penalty independent if you use ports or not.
Ready to use packet processing HLS IPs.	Time to market, modify existing application code instead of writing it from scratch.	Fixed functions, hard to change & expensive to upgrade.