Highest-density network application card

The Cisco Nexus® SmartNIC+ V9P is an FPGA-based network application card optimized for low latency and high density.

The device packs a powerful 16nm Xilinx Virtex UltraScale Plus (VU9P) FPGAs with 2.5M logic cells into a compact half-height half-length PCIe 16x form factor.

High-capacity and low-latency memory

An extensive memory hierarchy for complex memory-intensive applications

The Xilinx VU9P FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) features 75Mbit of block RAM and 270Mbit of UltraRAM on chip. The Cisco Nexus SmartNIC+ V9P further incorporates an additional 9GB of DDR4 DRAM on the board for high throughput access. The DRAM is accessible via a 72-bit-wide bus for maximum performance.

High-bandwidth connectivity

Dual QSFP-DD ports provide up to 400Gbps of full duplex connectivity.

The dual QSFP-DD ports offer high-speed 4x40GbE or 2x200GbE connectivity. Using QSFP-DD breakout cables expands the connectivity to 16x10GbE/25GbE4 connections. This high-density connectivity enables a range of high-performance directly connected network applications bypassing the need for traditional switching and multiplexing requirements.

Extensive IP library

Cisco is a specialist in low-latency high-performance FPGA IP cores.

We provide you the same high-speed low-latency IP blocks used in our market leading products including:

• 10GbE PCS/MAC with ultra-low-latency performance
• Low-latency high-throughput PCIe DMA engine
• Timing signaling and register interfaces including I2C
• Packet field extractor and frame multiplexer (with source code)
• Asynchronous FIFO and CDC modules (with source code)

Several example designs are also provided to help get design work started and completed quickly.

Integrated software library

A standard Linux driver as well as transparent TCP and UDP acceleration and low-level packet access.

The Cisco Nexus SmartNIC+ V9P functions out of the box as a high-performance network adapter. The entire SmartNIC software library is available including the ExaSOCK sockets application acceleration system and the libexanic direct user-space access API. Libexanic provides easy support for low-latency packet TX/RX managing the FPGA state (through register access) and low-latency TCP/UDP delegated sending of operations for hybrid hardware/software applications. The Cisco Nexus SmartNIC+ V9P also supports fast and easy firmware updates (without requiring reboots) and vital statistics monitoring (temperatures light levels etc.).