Router hardware

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I had been doing such a design some time ago but it never went past ordering the PCBs (partner gave the project up and I saw no marketing chances on my own). I still have some of them here - naked. The CPU part is MPC5200B, I have other systems based on it running with a 10/100 PHY (single port); on the board that got never brought to life the switch chip connects to the MPC5200 PHY and MII, it is a 5 port 10/100 part, but I have never talked to it (still have a few samples of it here).

You can have a look at it at

Feel free to contact me directly if there is some real interest.

Dimiter

------------------------------------------------------ Dimiter Popoff Transgalactic Instruments

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The bigger question is how much throughput you need? Router design is either mostly software (bound by CPU throughput limits then), or heavyily designed hardware (expensive & hard).

There are a few chipsets specificly designed for routers (ie. some of the Freescale PPC, or the Broadcom communication processor lines), as well as some lines devoted to things such as being ADSL routers by TI.

Although I'd suspect that for the most bang for the buck, you'd end up with something like a small PC running embedded linux/freebsd doing your router functions and be bound by the CPU limits of a software router.

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I bought a device that does what you want for NT$ 400 in Taiwan a while back. That was less than US$ 14 for quantity one, in a retail store, in a box with a CD and a power supply.

I took it apart, found the chip-set maker (it was an embedded X86 with two MII ports; one MII went to a 1-port PHY, the other MII went to a 4- port switch) I realized that I could not duplicate it for less that $50 - it was cheaper to walk into the store and buy a case of them.

How much router can _you_ build for $14?

RK

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This is doable with dual ethernet ports, using an early Linux kernel. However, if you hardware is SRAM bounded, you would need to port the kernel in FLASH. I suggest an ARM with 256K FLASH and 8K SRAM.

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d_s_klein wrote: [snip]

I guess this 1-port PHY was for WAN interface. So from software point of view (ie. Linux in your case), there are two network interfaces, eth0 and eth1 for ex., where eth0 is WAN and eth1 is 4 ports switch?

From my point of view it was a router - a module I plugged in to do a task.

I doubt that the "no-mmu x86" in the controlling IC was running Linux. It did the job; I didn't care.

RK

For a great many of these devices, the switch is actually a managed switch. So while the default firmware typically configures the four "lan" ports as a simple switch, with better firmware you can configure them as separate VLANs (i.e., eth1.0, eth1.1, etc. in Linux).

If you are only looking for small quantities, go for an off-the-shelf firewall/NAT/wireless router. If you want more control than the default firmware, install something like OpenWRT. We use LinkSys WRT54GL devices with OpenWRT - they are not the most modern of routers, but do a perfectly good job. And with OpenWRT, you can configure the port forwarding, VLANs, etc., exactly as you want.