MicroBlaze

Express Logic’s ThreadX® RTOS and NetX™ TCP/IP Network Stack are available for use with the Xilinx MicroBlaze™ soft-processor on Spartan FPGA platforms.

Highlights

Complete MicroBlaze Family Support

Reasonable Pricing

No Royalties

Complete ANSI C Source Code

Easy to Use and Powerful Services

Responsive Technical Support

Unlimited System Resources, including IP instances and UDP & TCP sockets

Flexible Packet Pool Construct

Timeout available on all thread suspension

UDP Fast Path Technology(TM)

piconet architecture for size and speed

Size Scales Automatically · Small Footprint (Instruction area size: 5-20K)

NetX is High-Performance

NetX is a high-performance implementation of the TCP/IP standards. NetX achieves its performance advantages through an efficient design that minimizes function calls within the API. In addition, NetX utilizes many performance enhancing ThreadX primitives.

NetX Size Advantages

Only the NetX services used by the application are brought into the final image. This results in the smallest possible TCP/IP implementation.

NetX Endian Optimizations

NetX optimizes endian conversion by using in-line macros instead of adding function call overhead inside the stack.

NetX Checksum Optimizations

NetX performs in-line IP and UDP checksum processing, which improves performance. Only TCP checksums are calculated via a function call. In addition, NetX can be easily configured to bypass any or all checksum operations. This is especially useful for applications with a highly reliable physical interface or when upper layers are also performing data integrity checking.

Easy to Use

NetX is designed for ease of use. The NetX API is designed to be easy to understand, powerful and consistent. The same is true with our reference manual and other supporting documentation.

NetX Performance

Running on the Xilinx MicroBlaze processor at 100MHz, NetX delivered outstanding packet performance, running a set of performance tests based on the Iperf open-source network transfer rate measurement tool.

The chart below shows NetX performance on the Transmit and Receive tests, running on the Xilinx Spartan-6 (SP605) FPGA Embedded Kit. The test is run in 2 modes, one with a packet size of 1500, and one with “Jumbo Frames” of 9000. All results are stated in Mbps (higher is better):