PCIe on Uniboard2

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We are Dehim Verveen (pictured left) and Thijs Snijder (pictured right), two electrical engineering students who for the past half year, have been working on researching how NVMe could be used to store streaming data. NVMe is a protocol used for storing data on non-volatile memory. It uses the PCIe protocol for communication.

PCIe is what we have been working on the majority of our time here. It is a very complex protocol, with many challenges. Not the least of which is that the Uniboard² was not designed with PCIe in mind.

Because the Uniboard² does not have any PCIe connectors we are using a PCIe-over-fiber extender. At one end we have a server with a PCIe to SFP+ adapter. On the other end we have the Uniboard² with several QSFP connectors plugged into it.

Currently we have PCIe working on a Uniboard² FPGA and are able to read out registers. But the Uniboard² is not yet able to communicate with the server, likely due to the QSFP connectors of the Uniboard² having different requirements than that of PCIe.