[Download] (FCCM 2003)
Ciaran Toal, Sakir Sezer, Xing Yu, School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Queen´s University Belfast, Ashby Building, Stranmillis Road Belfast, BT9 5AH, N. Ireland, U.K. Ciaran.Toal@ee.qub.ac.uk

This paper presents the architecture and implementation of a 2.5 Gbps Programmable Point-to-Point-Protocol Processor (P5) on a Virtex II FPGA. A 32-bit wide pipelined processor circuit is implemented for layer 2 frame processing and a Leon processor core is embedded for higher layer PPP control protocol processing. An AMBA bus interface is used to interlink the Leon processor to the hardware frame processing unit and presents a standard interface allowing easy retargeting to other processor platforms. Complex memory control is implemented to enable the microprocessor to handle the extreme data rate. The high-level system breakdown is described and Virtex II synthesis results presented.