Realtek RTL865x Advanced Home Gateway/SOHO Router Chips

The project I had worked on from 2001 to 2005, with our best software team members and hardware/IC designers.

The Realtek's RTL865x product family includes a series of highly integrated SoCs(System-On-A-Chip) specially designed for home/SOHO networks. Each integrates a RISC CPU, a powerful six port 10/100M Ethernet switch, and many peripheral interfaces which makes it an ideal platform choice for new SOHO/Home network products.

The RTL865x chip is very unique in its architecture. The embedded CPU is NOT for handling data packets but for system control and add-on application. It's the embedded Ethernet switch that handles most data packets. Common home networking tasks such as LAN switching, IP routing, TCP/UDP NAPT, DMZ(DeMilitarized Zone), Virtual Server, QoS classification, ACL for firewall application, are all switched by the hardware which requires NO CPU intervention*. With this architecture, the switch hardware handles more than 90% of network traffic, while only less than 10% of special network traffic needs spacial care by software running on the embedded CPU.

As of 2005H1, thanks to RTL865x's switch core, RTL865x based products still enjoy overwhelming performance lead and has the best performance/cost ratio against all other network SoC platforms in the Home/SOHO router market. It is actually the engine which silently drives most Wireless MIMO routers in market.

*: For applications such as PPTP/L2TP tunneling, IPsec, WLAN, DoS prevention, USB IP camera, USB NAS server, CPU is partially involved on the datapath. In case of WLAN router applicatiom, the 200Mhz MIPS CPU together with the powerful switch core powers the Netgear RangeMax 240 wireless router (Airgo pre-N TrueMIMO router) to deliver 120Mbps TCP throughput over WiFi and 190Mbps over wired Ethernet from LAN<->WAN full duplex in 2004 while all other routers in the market delivers only 40Mbps (Atheros SuperG) over WLAN and 80Mbps over wired Ethernet LAN->WAN.