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.).
