January 30th, 2020 – By: Igor Gorokhov
Using an embedded prototyping board to reduce system bring-up time and simplify customisation efforts.
The multi-channel parallelism and low-latency access of NAND flash technology have made Non-Volatile Memory express (NVMe) based SSDs very popular within the main segments of the data storage market, including not only the consumer electronics sector but also data centre processing and acceleration services, where the key role is played by specialised FPGA-based hardware for application-specific workloads.
Aldec has risen to the increasing demand for NVMe connectivity solutions for FPGA-based emulation and prototyping platforms by extending its portfolio of FMC-based I/O expansion daughter cards to include stackable FMC-NVMe boards and offering support for x4 NVMe SSDs in M.2 form factor via high-performance PCIe switch.
The easiest way to verify the performance of this FMC-NVMe card is to connect one to a TySOM-3 or 3A board from Aldec’s Zynq US+ MPSoC-based embedded prototyping board product line. These boards are capable of interfacing with NVMe thanks to an integrated PCIe block located in Programmable Logic (PL) part of the MPSoC and under the control of the embedded Linux running on the ARM Cortex-A53 cores in the Processing System (PS) part of the MPSoC.