Development of TCP/IP processing hardware

TCP/IP/Ethernet is a widely used data transfer technology in data acquisition systems. This technology is essential to construct back-end systems. On the other hand, it has not been sufficiently adopted in front-end systems because front-end devices have constraints that are difficult to satisfy. To overcome these constraints, we have developed TCP/IP processing hardware with the following features: high-speed data transfer, small logic size, simple interface, and low power consumption. We implemented the hardware on a field programmable gate array and measured its performance. The measured user data transfer speed is 95 Mbps with 100BASE-T Ethernet, which achieves the theoretical limit. We concluded that the hardware has sufficient performance for front-end devices.