This paper concerns novel single-chip system architecture options, based on the Xilinx Virtex-II Pro part, which includes up to four PowerPC cores and was launched in Spring 2002. The research decribed here was carried out pre-launch (i.e., prior to availability of real parts), so the paper focuses on initial architectural experiments based on simulation.

The application is a Mixed-version IP Router, named MIR, servicing gigabit ethernet ports. This would be of use to organizations with several gigabit ethernets, with a mixture of IPv4 and IPv6 hosts and routers attached directly to the networks. A particular benefit of a programmable approach based on Virtex-II Pro is that the router's functions can evolve smoothly, maintaining router performance as the organization migrates from IPv4 to IPv6 internally, and also as the Internet migrates externally. The basic aim is to carry out more frequent, and less control intensive, functions in logic, and other functions in the processor.

Two prototypes are described here. Both support four ethernet ports, but the designs are scalable upwards. The second one, the more ambitious of the two, instantiates a configuration appropriate when the bulk of the incoming packets are IPv4. Such packets are processed and switched entirely by logic, with no internal copying of packets between buffers and virtually no delay between packet receipt and onward forwarding. This involves a specially-tailored internal interconnection network between the four ports, and also processing performed in parallel with packet receipt, i.e. multi-threading in logic. IPv6 packets, or some rare IPv4 cases, are passed to a PowerPC core for processing. In essence, the PowerPC acts as a slave to the logic, rather than the more common opposite master-slave relationship.