The FlowMon probe is a sandwich of two programmable hardware cards – motherboard and interface card. The card are interconnected by means of a pair of proprietary connectors, each with 120 wires.

Version 1 of the probe used the COMBO6 motherboard and supported two Gigabit Ethernet interface cards: COMBO-4MTX with metallic ports and COMBO-4SFP with cages for SFP transceivers. The new version 2 uses the COMBO6X motherboard and the COMBO-4SFPRO interface card.

All boards are based on a combination of modern programmable chips such as FPGA, CPLD and TCAM with various types of memories (SSRAM, DRAM), power supplies and other standard electronic components.

Interestingly enough, newer FPGAs from Xilinx – starting from Virtex-II Pro – also contain one or more PowerPC processors. We use this function for implementing certain functions such as busmaster DMA.