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Not an Ethernet Transceiver | Hackaday.io

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custom(izable) circuit for sending some megabytes over differential pairs.

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Not an Ethernet Transceiver

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This is not Ethernet, though (initially) quite inspired by Fast Ethernet (100Base-TX) and using the same medium (RJ45/CAT5 or better) and magnetics. Or just plain matched impedance diffpair, I will not judge. It should provide mostly equivalent performance but does not require all the IEEE 802.3xyz hoop-jumping: it could even be one-way (just a single data pair plus clock pair) and can be implemented in a cheap FPGA (Ice45 ? A3P250?), TinyTapeout or even a Pi pico or something. As it progresses, it looks more like a poor man's Fibre Channel over Cat5... Applications are wherever you need to deport devices up to a dozen of meters with standard cabling (or circuit traces), such as sensors, sound, pictures... at a few megabytes per second. So far (May 2025) it's evolving towards a MAC+PHY pair, yet more digital logic and protocols than serious analog and signal processing... yet.

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@hackadayio

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Not an Ethernet Transceiver

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This is not Ethernet, though (initially) quite inspired by Fast Ethernet (100Base-TX) and using the same medium (RJ45/CAT5 or better) and magnetics. Or just plain matched impedance diffpair, I will not judge. It should provide mostly equivalent performance but does not require all the IEEE 802.3xyz hoop-jumping: it could even be one-way (just a single data pair plus clock pair) and can be implemented in a cheap FPGA (Ice45 ? A3P250?), TinyTapeout or even a Pi pico or something. As it progresses, it looks more like a poor man's Fibre Channel over Cat5... Applications are wherever you need to deport devices up to a dozen of meters with standard cabling (or circuit traces), such as sensors, sound, pictures... at a few megabytes per second. So far (May 2025) it's evolving towards a MAC+PHY pair, yet more digital logic and protocols than serious analog and signal processing... yet.

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