FROM EDN EUROPE: ADSL chip set cuts costs, extends reach

ADSL has in a short time become a commodity market in which key differentiators are bill of materials and software flexibility, according to LSI Logic. The company has introduced its HomeBase ADSL chip set, which both increases performance and reduces bill of materials. The three-chip set, which interfaces directly to an Ethernet port on the customer-premises side, comprises the AR8202 analogue front end, the AR900 network processor, and the L80255 Ethernet physical-layer chip. LSI says it kept the physical layer and front end separate because the physical layer is a high-volume, stand-alone function that has cost benefits as a discrete part, and keeping the analogue front end separate isolates the sensitive analogue-signal-processing circuitry and allows the network-processor chip to be made in CMOS.

The AR8202 uses 14-bit converters with a noise floor of –160 dBm/Hz and connects at distances as high as 27,000 ft. It uses a 17-MHz crystal for low cost and consumes less than 1W. The AR900 includes the DMT (discrete-multitone) engine, a 100-MHz ARM9, a hardware ATM segmentation-and-reassembly layer, a 10/100-Mbps Ethernet controller, and an SDRAM controller. It supports NATP (Network Address Translation Protocol) and full firewall inspection of every packet. The chip set maintains a high packet throughput at the highest lines rates, such as 8 Mbps downstream and 800 kbps upstream.

You can configure the chip set's open-source, royalty-free, Linux-based software to work with any DSLAM worldwide. The package comes with reference designs and sample software configurations. The bill of materials for the package is approximately $35 in volume quantities; the chip set costs $23 (10,000).

LSI Logic, +44 1344 413209, www.lsilogic.com.