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This paper presents P4FPGA, a new tool for developing and evaluating data plane applications. P4FPGA is an open-source compiler and runtime. The compiler extends the P4.org reference compiler with a custom backend that generates FPGA code. P4FPGA supports different architecture configurations, depending on the needs of the particular application.

We have benchmarked several representative P4 programs, and our experiments show that code generated by P4FPGA runs at line-rate at all packet sizes with latencies comparable to commercial ASICs. By combining high-level programming abstractions offered by P4 with a flexible and powerful hardware target, P4FPGA allows developers to rapidly prototype and deploy new data plane applications.