This is the development and community site of the "Programmable Hardware" activity, for historical reasons also known as "Liberouter". It is a part of research intent MSM6383917201 carried out by CESNET. The activity focuses on the development of hardware-accelerated network applications for high-speed networks. Our development efforts address specialized PCI cards with programmable chips (FPGA), their firmware, device drivers and other system software.

Our previous research prototypes have been a basis for several commercial products that are now offerred by our partner company INVEA-TECH.

For information about the individual applications see the Projects page or click the tabs on the left.

Recent news:

[27 Sep 2010] NetCOPE 1.3.0 Release Candidate 1

NetCOPE Platform 1.3.0 is now available for developer testing. This version brings major rework of Generic InterConnection System, as well as Generic BusMaster DMA Controllers. These improvements are targeted to support distribution of workload among many CPU cores of the host PC.

[31 Mar 2010] New COMBOI-10G4TXT interface card

Our hardware team activated the new COMBOI-10G4TXT interface card. It is equipped with VIRTEX 5 XC5VTX150T chip and four 10Gb SFP+ cages for multimode, monomode, CWDM or DWDM transceivers. The card will be used as a 4x10GbE hardware-accelerated interface card, and also for preliminary tests of 40Gb data transfers.

[15 Mar 2010] NetCOPE 1.2.0 Release Candidate 2

Release Candidate 2 of NetCOPE Platform 1.2.0 was released. This version brings several bugfixes and improvements:

• Fixed speed switching at 10/100/1000M interfaces
• Chip area significantly reduced in 10G2 version by using Virtex5 built-in CRC blocks.

[25 Feb 2010] NetCOPE 1.2.0 Release Candidate 1

Release Candidate 1 of NetCOPE Platform 1.2.0 was released. This version brings several important new features:

• Supports Xilinx ISE 11.4
• Fully 64-bit package for CentOS 5.4.
• Support for precise timestamp generation in hardware, using COMBOL-GPS card.

[1 Feb 2010] NIFIC 3.2.0 released

The stable package of NIFIC for COMBO-LXT and COMBO-10G2 was released. See NIFIC project page for more details.