Low Cost arm chips to offload TCP/IP stacks

Hi All,

I am considering an application with Spartan-3 FPGAs. I need to run TCP/IP and a few other networking applications along with other user logic. The trade-off that I am considering is -

Microblaze inside the FPGA costs about 2000LCs. I am considering I may be able to a lot more with those 2000LCs if I put an external ARM processor instead. I am wondering if there exists a no-frills ARM chip out there that would cost me a buck or two, then I may be able to get more out of those 2000LCs. Is there a chip out there?

TIA Sanjay

Reply to
parekh.sh
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NXP LPC210x series are very cheap - ought to be able to do TCP/IP etc.

Reply to
Mike Harrison

Something like:

SAM7X (integrated MAC) LM3S6965 (integrated MAC and PHY) LPC2368 (integrated MAC) etc.

...but if all you want is TCP/IP then there are probably lower cost solutions outside of ARM, like Cygnal, Zilog, Microchip etc. that come with examples.

-- Regards, Richard.

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Reply to
FreeRTOS.org

If you want a prepackaged hardware+software solution -- just needs magnetics on one side, provides a "socket" interface on the other (parallel or SPI) -- check out the WIZnet products:

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Not the cheapest solution out there, but could really save you a lot of development time.

-- Dave Tweed

Reply to
David Tweed

Thanks. I see on their block diagram that the AHB does not get driven out. Instead, the VPB what seems like a peripheral bus. I wonder what kind of performance I can get from this bus.

-sanjay

Reply to
parekh.sh

We have run our Powernet stack

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on both LPC2106 and LPC2148 with external Ethernet controllers from ASIX and RealTek. The performance was surprisingly good providing that you code the GPIO interface *very* carefully. The LPC2xxx parts with the fast GPIO (FIO) do better.

Stephen

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Stephen Pelc, stephenXXX@mpeforth.com
MicroProcessor Engineering Ltd - More Real, Less Time
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Reply to
Stephen Pelc

For highest speed, a FIQ driven parallel interface using FIO can give a pretty decent throughput

-From memory, when I interfaced a lo-res CMOS camera sensor, you can get something like 4Mbytes/sec throughput. The only issue is whether you can get enough contiguous parallel I/O bits across the bus without hitting a peripheral pin function you need to use. Losing pins to JTAG is also a potential problem on the smaller parts, but you can always use a bigger part for development - LPC213x is a good step-up from LPC2101/2/3 as the peripherals are pretty close to identical but JTAG is well clear of them.

Reply to
Mike Harrison

Hi Sanjay,

take a look at the LPC2220, this one has the AHB available, it also offers 64k SRAM, which is probably enough to execute a TCP/IP stack at full speed. It is also low cost, although not as low as the LPC2101/2/3, which might not provide enough memory for a TCP/IP to begin with.

Bob

Reply to
Robert_Teufel

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