Ethernet 10/100/1000 with uC

I think you'll find that Gig-E chips will all require a PCI bus. You can barely find a 10/100 chip that's not PCI.

If the requirement is for Gig-E connectivity but not 1000Mbps throughput, others have suggested PCI-to-ISA bridge chipsets. Or, there are a few MCUs with Gig-E integrated now.

What's the goal / requirement / scenario?

Richard

Tell marketing to f*ck off and use a 10 or 10/100 chip.

Hello,

many thanks for your answer !

High throughput is a strong requirement for this application (sorry can't tell more). It is used to transfer a lot of data via crosscable to local PC.

Can you suggest a PCI chip for this ?

Regards,

Martin

Hello,

why do you think this is silly ? With the right chip, interface and fast microcontroller / board, do you think you can't reach bandwidth worth to use

1000 MBit/s ? Do you have any statistics, which bandwidth can be reached by certain combinations of ethernet chips and microcontrollers ?

Regards,

Martin

Hello again,

just want to add, that i can't use USB 2.0 ! So only pure Ethernet solution is possible.

Regards,

Martin

One common solution is to use a cheap PHY chip from Marvell or Broadcomm (or others) this has a GMII or RGMII interface which has a direct connect to to microcontrollers such as Freescale (and others) powerPC . These processors also have integrated PCI controllers in them.

In order to get data from 10/100/1000 link you have to be able to cope with a theoretical byte rate of 125Mhz maximum, so you normally need something like PCI if you have to transport that data elswhere in a system.

Ken

It's silly because very few microcontrollers can keep up with a sustained gigabit datastream, let alone do useful processing on it. At minimum Ethernet packet sizes, you'll have a complete packet coming in about every 500 ns.

In my experience, when marketing demands a gigabit interface, most of the time what they really want is mere gigabit connectivity - the green link light comes on when plugged into a gigabit hub. The easiest way to get the green light is to use a gigabit hub - either a standalone chip (crack open a Netgear hub for a part number) or bundle the hub itself in your product.

If you positively have to play at gigabit speeds, you might check out the various and sundry network processors out there from Intel and Agere and the rest of the pack. Many of them talk to their PHY over a CSIX or UTOPIA interface.

Kelly

Gigabit Ethernet requires 64 Bit PCI-X or PCI Express and enough CPU power (at least comparable to 1.4GHz P-3 oder G4 PPC) for full throghput. Standard consumer PCs won't yield more than 200-300 MBit/s throughput unless they have onboard non-PCI GbE chips like Intel 875-541 combo (CSA connection) or NVidia nForce 3 250Gb.

So better forget about GbE.

Mit freundlichen Grüßen

Frank-Christian Krügel

How about running multiple 100BaseT connections between the systems ?

Paul

To make this clear: other solutions are almost certainly possible --- you just appear to have been told you're not allowed to use them.

Frankly, this sounds like a severe case of marketroids having taken over engineering.

--
Hans-Bernhard Broeker (broeker@physik.rwth-aachen.de)
Even if all the snow were burnt, ashes would remain.

Reminds me of the cheap routers...

they have all 100Mbit WAN conenction, but they can't route more than

15-20Mbit....

Kasper

This is still faster than what one would get with a 10Mbit router that can route10 Mbit/s. It just goes to show that one parameter spec does not give a full picture of a devices capabilities.

Regards Anton Erasmus

You could try implementing everything (processor, PHYs) into a FPGA Consider the Xilinx Virtex4 FX40 wich has 2 PowerPC 405 hard cores,

10/100/1000 ethernet PHYs (yes that's right) and 40k logic cells s that you can put in whatever IP core you want

And yes, FPGAs are the best of the best; the can do literaly WHATEVE

you want (DSP, embedded, Datacomm, AI...)

Hope that helps

Dimitr

No, that's wrong, actually. There are 4 10/100/1000 Ethernet MACs. You still need external PHYs.

Yes, but for the price of one of these V4 chips (*if* he can get hold of one), he could just put a whole PC (even an over-priced embedded PC) in the system.

If you want to think about FPGAs, a far more practical solution would be something like a small Cyclone II, which are two orders of magnitude cheaper. Opencores have a 10/100 Ethernet core, and you can use a soft cpu core (either a free opencores one, or a Nios II).

However, even that is probably overkill here (unless the extra flexibility of the fpga is needed). The first thing the OP must do is find out if 1000 Ethernet is actually realistic. Generally speaking, if you really need 1000 MBit Ethernet, you already have a very fast system, and probably already have specific high speed buses. Either that, or someone in marketing suggested it.

So assuming that 10/100 Ethernet is actually what the user needs, there are a couple of options. There are stand-alone controllers from SMSC or LSILogic (which also has a stand-alone 1000 MB MAC), or there are plenty of microcontrollers with built-in Ethernet MACs.

The ones using Ubicom "StreamEngine" technology (for instance the D-Link DGL-4300) can route at very close to line rate (100 Mbps). I don't remember the actual numbers. They do tend to cost a little more than others, but are still in the "cheap" category, as compared to buying a "big router".

Disclaimer: I am a former Ubicom employee.

MBit/s.

PCI

ASIX Electronics Corporation

have Non-PCI Gigabi Etherent controller(SRAM-like bus, ready soon) and USB2.0 to Gigabi Ethernet controller(Mass production). You may check with snipped-for-privacy@asix.com.t for further information.

Frank

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