NetX achieves near wire speed on STM32 platform

The speeds were achieved on the STM32F207 and STM32F217, STMicroelectronics' ARM Cortex-M3 processors. NetX Duo, Express Logic's dual IPv4/IPv6 TCP/IP stack, ships with more than 12 application protocols, including DHCP, FTP and many others, making it suitable for the small footprint, high performance connectivity needs of consumer, medical and industrial devices. According to Express Logic, to achieve these speeds, NetX takes advantage of a 100Mb/s Ethernet port that the STM32F207 and STM32F217 provide for high speed transfers. NetX Duo is designed to achieve 93 to 95% of wire speed on the STM32 processor, while using only 21 to 34% of the processor's cpu cycles. This performance is said to be achieved using the STM32F2xx ART Accelerator and the dedicated Ethernet MAC DMA connected to the 7layer multi AHB bus matrix. Express Logic claims this use of cpu frees up the Cortex-M3 based processor for other product functions that can run simultaneously without slowing network performance. Because of this, the processor can deliver maximum processing and connectivity, dropping design costs. "Not all TCP/IP stacks are equal," said William Lamie, president of Express Logic. "In addition to some stacks performing better than others, some also help achieve lower development costs and faster time to market. To best meet their needs, developers should focus on which stacks are optimised to get the most out of their hardware. NetX Duo delivers outstanding performance on STMicroelectronics' STM32F217, warranting significant consideration by the performance conscious developer." The NetX Duo performance was measured using iperf, an open source benchmark tool. For benchmarking, it runs on a Windows host connected to an STMicroelectronics STM3221G-EVAL target board via the Ethernet. The iperf TCP and UDP results were served by NetX Duo as a Web page and displayed by Microsoft Internet Explorer on the host.