A company usually associated more with high-speed Ethernet than with programmable logic announced the use of FPGAs in a new product to speed applications such as financial transactions.  Solarflare Communications Inc. announced a board-level product this week called Application OnLoad Engine, which uses an FPGA to move hardware-based application processing directly on to a network adapter for 10-Gbit Ethernet (http://www.solarflare.com/02-07-12-Solarflare-Unveils-ApplicationOnload-Engine-Application-Accelerator).

Now, Solarflare didn’t indicate which major FPGA architecture it was using, and I was unable to learn the supplier by press time, though an FPGA with multi-gigabit transceivers, like Altera’s Stratix or Xilinx’s Virtex, might be a good guess.  But there’s a more interesting wrinkle to this story than the brand of FPGA resident on the network adapter.  And that wrinkle stems from Solarflare’s slow march up the protocol stack, finding more profitable domains in developing programmable applications for high-speed networking in vertical market domains.

Solarflare was founded in the early 2000s with a tight focus on developing physical-layer chips for 10-Gbit Ethernet networks that would run over twisted-pair copper wire rather than fiber.  It was one of several startup chip companies working on the 10GBASE-T standard.  While the physical-layer chips worked reasonably well, the cost differential was never obvious enough to have copper replace fiber in all applications.  Solarflare began a slow change of identity similar to many players in the 10-Gbit networking space, such as Chelsio Communications Inc.

By 2006, Solarflare had merged with Level 5 Networks, a British company specializing in network interface cards for servers (http://www.networkworld.com/news/2006/041906-level5-solarflare.html).  It was part of an inevitable realization that the real money to be made in 10G Ethernet came at the level of the network card, not the chip.  In the spring of 2011, Solarflare sold off its physical-layer 10GBASE-T product lines to Marvell Technology Group (http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4215846/Report--Marvell-buys-10GBase-T-product-lines).  

Solarflare is still involved with chips, selling controllers that handle MAC and protocol-processing functions for 10-Gbit Ethernet.  But at the network interface card (NIC)  level, Solarflare has to be concerned about differentiation, just like every other company offering NICs for servers.  By adding an FPGA to a standard NIC, Solarflare provides a programmable module that its own customers can use to tightly optimize the NIC for a particular task.