ethernet_extension

[KTY137]

is this easily extendable with a DMA and AXI ethernetlite interface?
I want to use this code to send 32bit FIFO words which come with a frequency of around 2MHz and buffering them in the DDR3 before steaming them to PC.

[viktor-nikolov]

Hi!

I believe it is extendable in the way you suggest.

I personally didn't use DMA and AXI Ethernet Lite with the Microblaze. Nevertheless, Digilent published this DMA demo project for the Nexys Video board, which shows usage of AXI DMA with Microblaze and MIG.

My tutorial in this repository covers just a small part of such a design, the connection of the Microblaze to the MIG. 😃

My recommendation for avoiding timing issues is that you start with Microblaze running at 100 MHz, and when the design works at this speed, experiment with increasing the Microblaze frequency.

My gut feeling is that AXI DMA should be able to handle 2 Msps AXI-Stream to DDR3 via MIG without issues. That should be well within the MIG and DDR3 bandwidth.
However, the transfer from DDR3 over Ethernet to the PC may be slower than 2 Msps because Microblaze is not a very fast CPU.
Will you publish your project? I'm curious to see the result and the performance you will achieve. 😉