Date: Fri, 9 Mar 2001 15:22:56 -0800 (PST) From: Matt Dillon <dillon@earth.backplane.com> To: "E.B. Dreger" <eddy+public+spam@noc.everquick.net> Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: The ideal NIC (Re: if_fxp - the real point) Message-ID: <200103092322.f29NMu434554@earth.backplane.com> References: <Pine.LNX.4.20.0103092254240.10515-100000@www.everquick.net>
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:What production volumes are required before ASICs are feasible? What
:about having a FreeBSD CDROM + NIC bundle featuring whatever card gets
:designed?
:
:If ya can't join 'em, beat 'em.
:
:Okay. Back to work and reality. :-)
:
:Eddy
Designing an ASIC will have an NRE of probably around $50,000, and
you'd have to do a run of probably around 10,000 chips (at $1-$2 a chip)
for it to even come close to being cost effective. And that's assuming
you get the design right the first time. But that's only half the
problem. Building the PCI boards themselves in the smallish qantities
that we are talking about will be quite expensive. Ultimately you
would not be paying much less then you would for a cheap board
already on the market (and probably considerably more).
An FPGA can be programmed in singles, but they are very expensive to
buy in small quantities (lots less then a 1000 chips), and you have
all sorts of other issues involved as well including possibly needing
to purchase a second chip to help out with the PCI bus, and a serial cmos
eprom for chip initialization. And the board, of course. This would
probably cost even more then an ASIC. FPGAs also tend to eat a lot of
power, and highspeed CMOS FPGAs are very expensive.
And, on top of all of that you still need to buy a separate
filter / protection block (those black rectangle things you see on
ethernet boards), and again those can be quite costly in small
quantities.
-Matt
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