For some time now, digital circuit designers have been looking for speedy methods of configuring Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). The choice of components can help towards this, but at other times, it makes sense to source external components. The N3000 FPGA was released to help solve this challenge.
Although it has been discounted, the N3000 FPGA helped digital circuit designers to facilitate the development of FPGAs. This article explains more about the N3000 FPGA.
What is N3000 FPGA?
It is one of the hardware accelerator cards by Intel targeted at accelerating the speed of the circuit boards. The N3000 FPGA is a full-duplex, 100 Gigabyte per second (Gbps), in-system, reprogrammable acceleration card.
The core purpose of developing the card is to help improve the speed and efficiency of multi-loaded applications and devices.
Features of the N3000 FPGA
While in use, these are some of the features the N3000 FPGA had:
1. Memory Mixture
The memory or storage option for FPGAs have a role to play in the acceleration. In the case of the N3000 FPGA, it is optimized with multi-memory function, allowing for the mixture of memory options to accommodate several network functions.
2. Small Form Factor Packaging
The package or cover of the FPGA can also help in the acceleration, and most recently, small form factors have become popular.
The N3000 FPGA is a small form factor acceleration card with an integrated Network Interface Card (NIC). It also leverages the small packaging to deliver low power, speed, low latency and lower bits for custom networking pipeline.
3. Improved Security
The security of a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is as important as the functions of the board. In this case, the N3000 FPGA features the Root-of-Trust device. The device helps to it first protects the systems from FPGA-hosted security exploits.
The device also enables the systems to have more secured loading of the authorized workloads and board updates.
The Root-of-Trust device also helps to protect the systems to prevent unauthorized access to critical board interfaces and flash memory.
4. System Adaptations
The N3000 FPGA acceleration also helps to fast-track the configurable device workloads via the end-to-end industry-standard and open-source tool support. It allows the users to quickly adapt or switch to the newer industry standards and evolving workloads.
5. Example Design for 5G
Intel, the manufacturer of the N3000 FPGA is delving into the 5G market. That is one of the reasons why the N3000 FPGA acceleration card is optimized to be an example design or example workload, optimized for the 5G or 4G/LTE RAN layers.
As a reference Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), the N3000 FPGA uses the 4G/LTE or 5G Forward Error Correction (FEC).
6. N3000 FPGA is Reprogrammable
The N3000 FPGA acceleration card is highly-reprogrammable. It is programmed and reprogrammed with either the 5G bitstream or the 4G/LTE.
Conclusion
Intel may have discontinued the N3000 FPGA acceleration card, but the card helped to accelerate the company’s services to the Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and 5G adoptions.
Moving forward, Intel recommends using any of the DDoS, vRAN, SRv6, OVS or vFirewall for new designs.
