Micron's new M.2 Solid-State Drive
Posted on August 10, 2016
| Jeff Johnson
Computer memory giant, Micron, sent me a pre-production sample of their brand new M.2 NVMe solid-state drive. I tested it under PetaLinux on the PicoZed FMC Carrier Card V2 and the FPGA Drive adapter, and as expected, it passed all tests with flying colours. Although all of my previous tests were done with the Samsung VNAND 950 Pro SSD, the FPGA Drive adapter is designed to work with all M.2 PCIe compliant SSDs, and this test is confirmation of that.
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Measuring the speed of an NVMe PCIe SSD in PetaLinux
Posted on July 2, 2016
| Jeff Johnson
With FPGA Drive we can connect an NVM Express SSD to an FPGA, but what kind of real-world read and write speeds can we achieve with an FPGA? The answer is: it depends. The R/W speed of an SSD depends as much on the SSD as it does on the system it’s connected to. If I connect my SSD to a 286, I can’t expect to get the same performance as when it’s connected to a Xeon.
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At last! Affordable and fast, non-volatile storage for FPGAs
Posted on July 1, 2016
| Jeff Johnson
Let me introduce you to Opsero’s latest offering: FPGA Drive FMC, a new FPGA Mezzanine Card that allows you to connect an NVMe PCIe solid-state drive to your FPGA.
There’s got to be a better way. In the past, if you were developing an FPGA based product that needed a large amount of fast non-volatile storage, the best solution was to connect a SATA drive. Physical interfacing was pretty simple because all you needed was one gigabit transceiver.
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FMC for Connecting an SSD to an FPGA
Posted on June 8, 2016
| Jeff Johnson
Here’s a first look at the FMC version of the FPGA Drive product, featured with the Samsung VNAND 950 Pro SSD. The FMC version can carry M-keyed M.2 modules for PCI Express and is designed to support up to 4-lanes. It has a HPC FMC connector which can be used on a LPC FMC carrier for a single-lane connection to the SSD, or a HPC FMC carrier to exploit the maximum throughput of a 4-lane connection.
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Connecting an SSD to an FPGA running PetaLinux
Posted on April 15, 2016
| Jeff Johnson
This is the final part of a three part tutorial series on creating a PCI Express Root Complex design in Vivado and connecting a PCIe NVMe solid-state drive to an FPGA.
Part 1: Microblaze PCI Express Root Complex design in Vivado
Part 2: Zynq PCI Express Root Complex design in Vivado
Part 3: Connecting an SSD to an FPGA running PetaLinux (this tutorial)
In this final part of the tutorial series, we’ll start by testing our hardware with a stand-alone application that will verify the status of the PCIe link and perform enumeration of the PCIe end-points.
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Zynq PCI Express Root Complex design in Vivado
Posted on April 14, 2016
| Jeff Johnson
This is the second part of a three part tutorial series in which we will create a PCI Express Root Complex design in Vivado with the goal of connecting a PCIe NVMe solid-state drive to our FPGA.
Part 1: Microblaze PCI Express Root Complex design in Vivado
Part 2: Zynq PCI Express Root Complex design in Vivado (this tutorial)
Part 3: Connecting an SSD to an FPGA running PetaLinux
In this second part of the tutorial series, we will build a Zynq based design targeting the PicoZed 7Z030 and PicoZed FMC Carrier Card V2.
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Microblaze PCI Express Root Complex design in Vivado
Posted on April 13, 2016
| Jeff Johnson
This is the first part of a three part tutorial series in which we will go through the steps to create a PCI Express Root Complex design in Vivado, with the goal of being able to connect a PCIe end-point to our FPGA. We will test the design on hardware by connecting a PCIe NVMe solid-state drive to our FPGA using the FPGA Drive adapter.
Part 1: Microblaze PCI Express Root Complex design in Vivado (this tutorial)
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FPGA Drive Board Bring-up
Posted on March 31, 2016
| Jeff Johnson
Bring-up of the first FPGA Drive with the Kintex-7 KC705 Evaluation board went nice and smoothly today. In the photo below you’ll see the KC705 and FPGA Drive adapter which is loaded with a Samsung V-NAND 950 Pro. The solid-state drive is an M.2 form factor, NVM Express, 4-lane PCI Express drive with 256GB of storage.
A little intro to NVM Express. NVM Express or NVMe is an interfacing specification for accessing SSDs over a PCI Express bus.
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A first peek at FPGA Drive
Posted on March 15, 2016
| Jeff Johnson
With the first prototypes on the way, it’s time to take a closer look at what exactly FPGA Drive is and how it can help you to develop new disruptive technologies with FPGAs and SSDs. Here’s what you need to know in 3 points:
FPGA Drive enables you to connect a high-speed Solid State Drive (SSD) to an FPGA FPGA Drive delivers high-capacity, extreme-throughput non-volatile storage to FPGA development boards FPGA Drive connects a 4-lane PCI Express bus between your FPGA and SSD The 3D rendered image shows the following key features:
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Unboxing Samsung V-NAND SSD 950 Pro M.2 NVM Express
Posted on February 13, 2016
| Jeff Johnson
Very excited to be showing off my new Samsung SSD 950 in the M.2 form factor. This tiny solid-state drive has a PCI Express Gen3 x 4-lane interface for a more direct connection to the CPU which enables a much higher throughput than a SATA interface. According to Samsung:
It outperforms SATA SSDs by over 4.5 times in sequential read and by over 2.5 times in sequential write, delivering the speeds of 2,500 MB/s and 1,500 MB/s respectively.
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