Open Hardware Ethernet Switch project, part 1

Switch project, part 1 2025-05-08 18:00 One of my longest-running projects has been an open hardware Ethernet switch. This has been one of the key driving forces behind many of my other projects, such as ngscopeclient and the high speed probes. It was also the project that got me into high speed digital design. So I figured it’s time to kick off a series with a short writeup of where things are now, how we got there, and what’s coming next. If you follow me on Mastodon you’ve probably seen most of this in bits and pieces but I wanted to collect it all in one place. Ancient history: The first switch The first generation never had a name, it was just called “open-gig-switch” or something in my subversion repository (this was circa 2012 before I was primarily running on git). I couldn’t find any many-port gigabit switch ASICs that were suitable for an OSH project (i.e. purchasable in qty 1, no NDA needed for datasheet, etc). So an FPGA-based from-scratch design seemed the only optio ... Read full article.