Due to the increasing heterogeneity in network user requirements, dynamically varying day to day network traffic patterns and delay in network service deployment, there is a huge demand for scalability and flexibility in modern networking infrastructure, which in return has paved way for the introduction of Software Defined Networking (SDN) in core networks. In this paper, we present an FPGA-based switch which is fully compliant with OpenFlow; the pioneering protocol for southbound interface of SDN. The switch architecture is completely implemented on hardware. The design consists of an OpenFlow Southbound agent which can process OpenFlow packets at a rate of 10Gbps. The proposed architecture speed scales up to 400Gbps while it consumes only 60% resources on a Xilinx Virtex-7 featuring XC7VX485T FPGA.

A RTL C-based design and verification methodology is presented which enabled the successful high speed validation of a 7 million gate simultaneous multi-threaded (SMT) network processor. The methodology is centered on statically scheduled C-based coding style, C to HDL translation, and a novel RTL-C to RTL-Verilog equivalence checking flow. It leverages improved simulation performance combined with static techniques to reduce the amount of RTL-Verilog and gate-level verification required during development.

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