Design a Flexible Software Development Environment on NetFPGA Platform

Among numerous embedded platforms, NetFPGA provides developers with a freely programmable FPGA component to design custom functionalities in networking. However, most hardware projects are developed based on reference designs without embedded operating system. For hybrid developments on multi-layers, there will be some difficulties to apply. On the other hand, due to the limited resources on embedded platform, both performance and flexibility need to be concerned on implementation. And for networking processing, it is quite difficult to adjust control parameters without software environment. Therefore, this paper proposes an integrated architecture using PowerPC processor on NetFPGA and embedded Linux operating system on NetFPGA platform. This not only provides developers with an environment for software execution which added more flexibility, but also enhanced the system to provide more applied possibilities on development.