An FPGA-Based Optical IOH Architecture for Embedded System

Data traffic keeps increasing dramatically in the connected world and it pushes hard on evolution of IO technology. As technology progress, a simple and high-speed unified interconnect becomes practical to support many different protocols. Light Peak (LPK) is a high-bandwidth, inexpensive optical interconnect technology developed by Intel for this purpose. Also, to meet versatile and ever changing I/O needs, an adaptive IOH (I/O Hub) architecture could provide satisfying flexibility. In this paper, we present a high bandwidth and flexible IOH architecture for embedded system that is implemented on FPGA. The platform has 2x 10Gbps optical LPK links, and several SATA, Ethernet and Display Port interfaces. In addition to hardware, we present a software stack framework that provides a unified interface for protocols mapping, replacing numerous individual hardware controller, by utilizing LPK's versatile host controller. Thus it reduces the cost and development effort, and enhances the IOH flexibility. We also describe a configurable hardware protocol adapter in device side, which can be directly connected to any device. IO meter and Iperf show performance of SATA, Ethernet on this FPGA based IOH is competitive with the native ones.