PARIS — In hopes of capturing an emerging market of small-office, home-office (SoHo) broadband routers for home-networking applications, Philips Semiconductors is rolling out a family of Linux-based Gateway-on-a-Chip silicon, integrated with a system processor, a packet processor and an IP Secure engine. Billed as a complete package of silicon and embedded software, the offering can be used in routers with built-in wide-area-network connectivity or with standalone cable or DSL routers that connect to a cable or digital subscriber line modem via Ethernet.
The Gateway-on-a-Chip processors provide "at least three times higher throughput" than similarly priced solutions in the residential/SoHo router market, said Hamid Butt, general manager for business-line broadband access at Philips Semiconductors. Along with network protection and encryption to guarantee user privacy and authentication, "we provide performance of more than 90 Mbits/second for IPsec VPN [virtual private network] and up to 100 Mbits/s for firewall," he said. The goal of many manufacturers of SoHo broadband routers is to achieve high-security broadband access and prevent VPN routers from becoming the bottleneck for overall system performance.
Analysts are bullish on the home network silicon market. In-Stat, for one, projects 21 million new home net connections this year, jumping to 109 million in 2006. Mike Wolf, director of enterprise and residential communications research at In-Stat, said that such a rise is being driven by "a continued increase in new home network installs, and a rising number of network connections per home."
As more consumers install home nets to share both Internet access and files among PCs within a home, the market is beginning to see a need for a modem capable of handling firewalls and VPN security at a much higher speed. Over time, demand will rise for a cost-effective home router/modem combo, observers said. Wolf noted, for example, that cable modems with wireless LAN functionality are getting a lot of interest.
Processors like Philips' Gateway-on-a-Chip can be used to build access point/router combinations, Wolf said. "And this is probably the higher-volume market in the next six months. What vendors do is take a client WLAN chip set and use a communication processor to handle the routing/access point processing."
Design decisions
But not everyone believes integrating a separate communication processor, such as Gateway-on-a-Chip, into cable modems and routers is the way to go. "Broadcom, for one, is integrating more of the WLAN baseband/MAC into the cable modem chip set," said In-Stat's Wolf, "and they believe you can run all the processing from WLAN and routing off an integrated MIPS processor." He noted, "This is potentially true, but it's a design decision for the system manufacturer to make."
Philips' Gateway-on-a-Chip solutions include Linux-enabled MIPS-based processors like the PTD2002 for wireless and security routers; PTD211X for voice-over-Internet Protocol-enabled routers; PTD2210 for xDSL routers and PTD241X for voice-over-broadband routers.
"PTD22XX and PTD24XX are most suitable for building routers with built-in WAN connectivity," Philips' Butt explained, whereas "PTD20XX and PTD21XX are suitable for cable/DSL routers that connect to a cable or DSL modem via Ethernet." Because all the processors are integrated with a system processor, packet processor and IPsec engine, "a customer only needs to determine which product of the offering best fits their needs," he added.
PTD2002, for example, is integrated with two 32-bit MIPS cores, both running at 133 MHz — one responsible for packet processing and the other for system processing. The same chip packs a built-in IPsec engine and a number of standard system interfaces and two 10/100 Ethernet media-access-control interfaces.
What separates Gateway-on-a-Chip from other offerings is a complete software package, including Philips' Release 3.0 for Linux, Butt said. The software platform, complete with VoIP, firewall and VPN applications, comes with an embedded Linux kernel, advanced networking, network address translation, WLAN access point and a variety of management and configuration tools.
In-Stat's Wolf observed, "Linux is getting a lot of interest, displacing Wind River's VxWorks in some wins." Besides being royalty-free, "Linux is the OS of choice for higher-end customer-premises equipment, such as set-top boxes," he added. "And as you see more robust CPE processors get integrated, this will drive a move toward Linux."
