Philipp Keydel
I'm co-founder of Synogate, a startup for chip design (RTL/VLSI) and FPGA development with focus on network accelerators, smartNIC applications, and stateful networking/flow tracking at 100+ GbE.
We have deep roots in software development, expertise in IP networks and a free and open-source framework for more productive and accessible digital circuit design called "Gatery". With this, we quickly develop highly performant, efficient and secure networking solutions for data centers and internet infrastructure.
Session
This talk presents how networking tasks can be offloaded to dedicated hardware/NPUs (network processing units) and why this is a great idea.
First, we take a look at the fundamentals of digital circuit design, what it is and how it is done.
Then, focus is on how oflloading network tasks is a particularly beautiful example of the advantages of hardware-implementing logic, with examples like TCP offloading, cybersecurity applications, or traffic shaping, and why time (= increasing network bandwidth) is playing to the advantage of dedicated chips vs. CPUs/software.
To be fair and balanced, there will also be a look at the downsides of chips, but of course also ideas for mitigating them.
Finally, there will be a look at what's out there, and how to integrate custom chips into your systems.