Show HN: SatCat5, the open-source FPGA Ethernet switch

190 points

2 years ago

We've just launched v2.5 of SatCat5, the open-source FPGA Ethernet switch [1]. SatCat5 contains various FPGA building blocks that let you build a custom mixed-media Ethernet switch. It was originally intended for cubesats [2] but has many other potential applications.

The headline feature for this release is support for the IEEE-1588 Precision Time Protocol (PTP). SatCat5 has demonstrated end-to-end synchronization to within 50 ps-rms, which is approaching the world-leading performance of CERN's White Rabbit Project [3]. Except we're doing time-transfer over regular, non-synchronous Ethernet. The key breakthrough is a new technology for digital timestamps that we've published in IEEE Access [4].

This project was featured on HN back in 2023 [5]. Since then, we've changed to the CERN-OHL-W v2.0 license, which has much better legal clarity for FPGA projects.

[1] https://github.com/the-aerospace-corporation/satcat5 [2] https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/smallsat/2020/all2020/174/ [3] https://white-rabbit.web.cern.ch/documents/White_Rabbit-a_PT... [4] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10367970 [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34817550

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