High Level Synthesis Tool for High Speed Packet Processing

The main objective of this Master Thesis is to design and implement a high level synthesis tool for high speed packet processing. For a given network packet, determining the destination and performing the required alterations to the packet are the key parts of Packet Processing. The idea is to provide customers a customized Ethernet switch which is reliable and flexible. As a requirement for this, a high level packet processing language (PPL) is designed instead of any hardware descriptive language because of the regularity of packet processing. The packet processing is described in a powerful way based on the PPL. In this thesis, a design of Ethernet switch based on the PPL is proposed. Hardware implementation is done for the design and MyHDL is used as the hardware description language. Using Python, the compiled PPL program is translated into an hardware model. A tool has been developed which consists of a hardware generator and certain hardware infrastructures. Another part in the thesis is optimization of the initial design. For instance, optimization is done to run as much code as possible in parallel or for removal of unused hardware in the generated switch. Verification is done and synthesis results have been listed comparing the two designs. Hence, we conclude that the initial design is more flexible and has more redundancy while the optimized design is more friendly to hardware cost and power consumption.