Craig Peacock wrote:
>
> If anyone is interested in preliminary information, try
>
> http://www.iready.com/products/products/property/tuner_ethernet/
>
> With the way the future is heading, and if we can buy these devices
> cheap, then I would guess these will be very popular I.C.'s in years to
> come.

Unfortunately, the iready etuner ethernet is still pretty far from what
I think most of us want.  I talked to them this afternoon- they haven't
even had them fabbed yet.  Their plan is to use an external PHY (the
physical interface, the part that actually makes the signal, which then
has to be hooked up to a transformer, and then to a connector) using the
IEEE defined MII interface- still not a single chip solution.  They will
sell you the information to integrate their TCP/IP stack and MAC into
your ASIC.  The PHY is one of the harder things to integrate, though
integrated MAC/PHY 10/100 chips do exist (like the Intel 82559 for the
PCI bus).

Ethernet is not necessarily a roll your own solution, especially if you
want to be able to talk to anything under the specification.  By using
someone else's card you will be able to save yourself a lot of
headache.  To do it yourself, you need to start worrying about well
balanced (in impedance and length) high quality transmission lines,
really nice terminations and very precise rise & fall times (you can't
be too fast or too slow) and so on.  To network a PIC, leverage (I have
that term, but its appropriate) the designs that have already been done
with people with a far larger R&D budget.

Matt

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