Non-PCI gigabit Ethernet controller

Hello there,

I wonder whether somebody provide non-PCI gigabit Ethernet controller.

I mean a Ethernet transceiver with PHY and MAC that can interface a DSP, or a microcontroller to Ethernet communication.

It seems most gigabit Ethernet controller are communicating to PCI bus.

Thanks for the help,

DS

Hi,

Not sure but doesnt Xilinx have an IP core for their CPLD/FPGA's for Gigabit Ethernet? Worth a look. As for an off the shelf chip, I havent seen one but that doesnt mean they dont exist. :-)

Oliver Hannaford-Day

There are plenty of chipsets that do that.

Of course, one chip of the set is a PCI controller :)

Seriously, I have seen plenty of applications where they just threw a PCI interface chip next to the controller chip and went to town.

Thanks for the reply. Could you give me an example of the PCI interface chip? My DSP is TMS320C67xx. It is a "standard" 32 bit DSP.

We used to use the Galileo Technologies chip. A quick search to their web page, wwww.galileot.com, shows that they apparently have been eaten by a company called marvell. Try their communications controller family, or perhaps call them and ask what they did with the Galileo products. The last PCI stuff I worked on was a PC chipset from AMD (build into the Opteron CPU). I am sure there are other vendors as well.

Luck !

PS. I am a software guy, but you could do worse than to use the PCI system as a bridge in any case. It is not just a bus, but an entire pheriperal management system, with an organized method to discover and retrive information on devices, and the means to configure and address them.

I know this just adds a different problem, but you can get USB 1.1 or USB 2.0 dongles that interface to gigabit ethernet.

There is no "x" in my email address.

Look for any of the standard PC/ISA-bus chips (i.e. SMSC 91C111 or Realtek xyz)

- Rene

What the poster was looking for was Gigabit chips not 10baseT.

The speed is critical to my application. In addition I thought "giga" sounds more advanced than "mega".

Thanks Scott. I agree with you that adding a bridge is a silly idea. Marvell has not got a non-PCI version gigabit Ethernet either. I guess we just wait.

You'll be waiting a long time. There's no market for a gigabit controller that can only do 10% throughput because of its bus. Have you noticed only 3 products even exist for non-PCI 100Mbps?

If you want bragging rights for gigabit in your design, it looks like you'll need to use a PCI bridge, wait for an integrated MCU, or switch to an MCU with PCI.

Richard

Did you study any (early) 1 GbE switch or other 1 Gb network component? You might find some useful hints about the chips used. Modern 1 Gb switches most likely contain only ASICs, so they are not of any use in your case.

Paul

I gave up on the gigabits now.

Can you list the three providers of the non-PCI 100Mbps? I only knew this one:

(That's a 10Mb model; I suspect you meant the one below.)

Here are the three, in rough order of their apparent popularity:

The Asix has the benefit of being an NE2000 interface, which gives you no shortage of reference drivers. It's been on the scene for about 3 years now, and it's becoming pretty popular, at least relatively speaking.

For a proto board of the Asix, go to

Cheers, Richard

Thanks. DS