MCUs have Ethernet MACs and open source stacks

Edited by the Electronicstalk editorial team Nov 15, 2007

Free Ethernet stacks allow eCOG microcontrollers to address specific size and performance points.

Cyan has moved into full production of six eCOG1X microcontrollers featuring Ethernet MACs.

To cut bills of material in Ethernet applications, the company has also ported and verified the operation of two free Ethernet stacks which allow eCOG microcontrollers to address specific size and performance points.

lwIP (lightweight IP) stack aims to reduce RAM usage while still supporting full-scale TCP and the uIP stack provides all the necessary protocols for Internet communications and has very small data and code memory requirements.

Both stacks are open source, easy to use, and were developed by the Swedish Institute of Computer Science.

The six eCOG1X devices all have 512Kbit Flash and 24Kbiy RAM and all except one feature analogue inputs and outputs.

Package options include 68-pin QFN, 100-pin QFN and 208-pin TFBGA, the two higher-pin-count devices also offer PHY-free USB solutions.

The Ethernet MAC on eCOG1X microcontrollers supports 10 and 100Mbits/s with the appropriate PHY, a MII for PHY configuration, compliance with IEEE 802.3 CSMA/CD, single address filtering and ring or chain operation.

Dr Paul Johnson, President and CTO at Cyan comments: "Adding IP to legacy designs can be a relatively complicated and our combined offering makes it a lot easier for designers to approach embedded Ethernet".

"The combination Ethernet and USB on a very low power chip can also be used to solve a myriad of interface and connectivity issues".

As with all applications, CyanIDE, the free eCOG development environment, ensures that configuration of every embedded Ethernet application is quick and painless.