NEC Adds Horsepower to Home Gateways

By Michael Foley
iApplianceWeb
(05/28/01, 12:02:29 PM EDT)

NEC Corporation is offering its new beefed up network controller for home networks and broadband connectivity. The uPD98502 integrates PCI bridge functions for applications requiring a variety of data/signal exchanges, including residential and small business gateways, MTU (Multi-tenant Unit) aggregators, and xDSL modems and routers. The controller will manage the data exchange between broadband connections and home networks.

The uPD98502 is based on the 100MHz MIPS RISC 64-bit embedded CPU. It contains a variety of communication ports, such as two 10/100 Ethernet ports , a 50 Mbps ATM interface and USB slave interface. The network controller will be used in networking equipment to exchange high-speed data across different types of networks, such as HomePNA, Power Line Communication, IEEE1394, Bluetooth, and IEEE802.11a and 11b.

NEC's uPD98502 with PCI bridge functionality operates at 32bits and 33MHz to handle various communication mediums on the PCI bus. The PCI bridge not only connects the desktop PC's peripherals, but also provides the system designer flexibility to connect the bus to a wide variety of LAN peripherals.

The uPD98502 features:

• MIPS-based VR4120A, 128MIPS@100MHz, 16KB instruction cache, 8KB data cache
• Glueless interface to 32MB of SDRAM and 8MB of flash ROM
• A variety of communication ports:
  • An ATM Cell Processor
  • An Ethernet Controller
  • Two ports of 10/100Mbps Ethernet MACs
  • A USB Controller
  • A PCI Bridge

The uPD98502 is available now. Pricing is $25 in 10,000 unit quantities.