San Jose, CA — (press release excerpt) — Micrel Semiconductor today announced a highly integrated, high-performance small office / home office (SOHO) gateway system-on-chip processor and associated Linux-based reference design.

The KS8695 integrates a 5-port fast Ethernet transceiver, MACs, switch controller, and on-chip framebuffer memory with a high-performance ARM922T core, offering a fully-optimized multi-port gateway-on-a-chip for the SOHO gateway market.

Summary of features and specs . . .

• 166MHz 32-bit ARM922T CPU core with a memory-management-unit (MMU). The high-performance CPU core provides a platform to deliver value-added differentiation such as Firewall, VPN or routing performance. The MMU is needed to run some embedded operating systems such as Linux or WinCE(R).
• 5-port Ethernet managed switch, on-chip frame buffers and five low-power mixed-signal 10/100 transceivers for WAN port Internet sharing and LAN switching at wire speed.
• The WAN port connection supports xDSL, cable modem, wireless and fiber. All five transceivers support Auto MDI/MDIX to detect and support crossover cable.
• PCMCIA and MII interfaces for wireless LAN 802.11 and its variants (802.11b/a/g) to enable combo wireline and wireless LAN router products.
• A variety of hardware accelerations and optimizations to offload CPU utilization to enhance performance. Included are a protocol engine and three DMA engines with FIFO buffers. The protocol engine speeds up network protocol applications such as NAT, the most common SOHO gateway protocol for the Internet sharing. The DMA engines and FIFO buffers increase the data traffic efficiency among the WAN port, CPU, and LAN ports.

Typical applications include SOHO and residential gateway for broadband access sharing, firewall or VPN (Virtual Private Network) security appliance, and combo wireline and wireless LAN gateway. Additionally, the KS8695 can address VoIP gateway or Fiber-to-the-Home CPE applications.

Complete SOHO gateway hardware and software reference designs are available for the KS8695 chipset development. Included are a Linux-based gateway solution for fast time-to-market, various board support packages, and source codes for ODM/OEM customers to incorporate with their embedded operating system and software development environment. Evaluation boards for a stand-alone gateway system or combo wireless and wireline gateway are also available.

The KS8695 is available in production volumes today, supplied in a 208-pin PQFP package and priced below $20 for 10,000 pieces order quantity. A turnkey reference design has been developed for gateway application, complete with firmware, kernel and application software support.

 
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