Network-attached FPGAs allow for high bandwidth and deterministic processing of the data flowing through a network fabric. Arista's 7130 network applications are targeted at traditional network functions: switching, filtering, aggregation or timestamping. However, partner and customer applications are increasingly implementing higher order functions like full tick-to-trade trading algorithms.
While FPGA applications can be challenging to develop, the Arista 7130 makes them easy to deploy, configure, and monitor. Arista's APIs and frameworks allow developers to build applications for deployment like any other operating system extension. The 7130 development toolkits provide information about our hardware, including FPGA pinouts and other details enabling unfettered access to the facilities provided by the in-system FPGAs. The MOSAPI and EOS SDK offer monitoring, CLI, API, and FPGA image management.
The Arista 7130 Developer ecosystem provides:
- Sample Vivado projects, pinouts, constraints, and all other information required to build FPGA images for 7130 development standard FPGAs.
- IP Cores, built and tested while developing Arista's own applications. These IP Cores implement many features that will be useful in building customised applications.
- Software libraries that can be included with custom applications to automate routine tasks or to provide examples how to use the OS APIs.
- Worked examples which demonstrate how to use the software APIs and IP Cores as well as best practices for writing and building applications.
- Support for third party development kits:
- Arista Switch Development Kit for Vitis
- Enyx nxFramework -- providing a higher-layer toolkit for building network applications, including software inspectors, PCIE DMA engine, TCP Offload Engines etc.