Single-Chip Solutions

To cope with Intel's game plan to lower prices and expand its presence in the Fast Ethernet market, many networking IC suppliers have been scrambling to introduce competing products that will enable hardware vendors to reduce their costs.

The chip makers' efforts started late last year, when AMD, Galileo Technology, and Texas Instruments unveiled a new generation of Fast Ethernet ICs. These chips promise to keep the price pressure on Intel by reducing chip count and speeding switch designs to market.

In an effort to cut the cost of entry-level, shared-media Fast Ethernet hubs, AMD has rolled out a single-chip, four-port repeater. The new Am79C730 integrated solution will enable hardware manufacturers to build an eight-port, 100Base-TX hub with just two chips. With this move, AMD, long a key player in the Ethernet IC industry, has successfully closed what was already a narrow gap between Fast Ethernet hub-port costs and 10-Mbps Ethernet switch-port costs.

Another contributor to the escalating price war, Galileo, has brought out its GT-48002 switched Fast Ethernet controller, which combines in a single device two full-duplex 100-Mbps Fast Ethernet controllers, a full-speed switching engine, a memory controller, and hardware network-management support.

Based on the company's ThunderSwitch scalable switching architecture, Texas Instruments' new TNETX3150 "switch-on-a-chip" integrates all the key components used in 10/100 Ethernet switch design onto a single IC, including a high-performance, 3.2-Gbps data-throughput engine, 12 10Base-T media access controllers (MACs), and three 10/100Base-T MACs. Several Taiwanese companies, including Acer Netxus, a network start-up and a member of the Acer Group, have backed this new design.

U.S.-based companies are not alone in noticing network vendors' growing appetite for highly integrated Ethernet chips. Macronix International, Realtek Semiconductor, and Winbond Electronics all currently have future-generation models on the drawing board.

Realtek Semiconductor, an IC maker, has introduced a single-chip Fast Ethernet controller, the RTL8139 , which operates at 10 or 100 Mbps. The company says that the RTL8139 is the first in a series of single-chip products. The single-chip switching engine integrates the MAC specification, physical chips, and a transceiver into silicon. Mass production will begin in October.

Meanwhile, Macronix is set to announce a family of two-chip 100Base-TX chips in the second half of this year. The company, which has set its sights on becoming the largest network IC supplier in Taiwan within the next year, is developing an all-Giga bit-Ethernet switch controller and a number of100-Mbps switching hub ICs, all of which are scheduled to be launched in 1998.

The coming crop of highly integrated Ethernet ICs still must clear several technology hurdles. Ching Yang Wang, vice president of marketing and product planning at D-Link, says that it is not viable to integrate digital ICs with analog ones without sacrificing performance. Moreover, due to limits imposed by standard IC-fabrication processes, the yield rate is very low. "We found that it is not really more cost-effective to use a single-chip device -- not for the near future," he explains.

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Just One Chip Will Do It

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Realtek Semiconductor integrates Fast Ethernet onto a single chip.