Marvell has announced Alaska M 3610 10Gbit copper PHYs with < 1W power thanks to the 5 nm technology. The 10Gblox PHYs had 3.5 W, which I think was the main reason why the design was thrown away… So, if this new PHY works as Marvell says, would this be a way to pursue to get a full copper UbiSwitch daughterboard? We’d still like these full-copper solutions more than the bulky SFP…
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I came on here to ask the same question, we have an application requiring a few devices to be connected to a gigabit network and a pair of processors connected with a 2.5G link. The ubiswitch looks like a great option if we could avoid the SFP form factor. We’re using on a drone so space and weight are precious!
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@peci1 Thanks for this information. That definitely makes a 10G Copper baseboard much more possible. 3 x 4W 10G Copper PHYs killed 10GBlox due to heat dissipation, but a 1W 10G Copper PHY would be much easier to heatsink (if it even needed much at all). Incidentally I have a meeting with my contact at Marvell tomorrow so I’ll bring this up.
We do have some other customers asking us if we’ll release a 10G Copper Baseboard. At the moment this is likely to be a custom development project with some NRE costs, but I suspect this will work its way into our standard lineup. Alternatively if a customer is willing to order, say, 20 pieces upfront, that helps fund our design.
Before that, though, is placing something like an IMX8 onto the baseboard, turning one of the ports into a LAN/WAN port, and running Open WRT on it. We’ve already started on the design of that.
I’d say just keep an eye out for a 10G Copper baseboard, I suspect it’s going to happen anyway, in the next 6 months.
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Any preference on connector type?
For us working on drones we use JST GH connectors everywhere else so it’s always preferred and seems fine for 1G ethernet. Not sure if the same is true for 2.5G however.
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We use Molex PicoClasp. It’s positive locking and a bit smaller. Thoughts?
Probably a good option. We’ve found the picoblade to not be a great connector, i suspect that the positive locking will help with this.
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peci1, spoke to Marvell about this today. Their new PHYs can achieve 10Gbps at 100 meters, max power consumption of 1.1W or so. Pretty impressive. They also have a 500 meter 100Mbps mode which is aimed at surveillance camera applications.
Pretty cool stuff. Estimated release date is end of Q1 2024. We’re on the waitlist and will get some UbiSwitch hardware out with it around then.
Thanks again for the tip.
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