SiliconAlly: GigaPHY Testchip is back from Fabrication and Packaging

May 18, 2023 -- A long time of waiting ended this week for Siliconally. We got our test chip, called GigaPHY, back from fabrication and packaging.

The chip contains 2 Dual PHY instances supporting 100BASE-T1 and 1000BASE-T1 communication and 1 Single PHY instance with 100BASE-T1 communication. Additionally we have some more on-chip memory for data collection and GMII and SGMII integrated.

Bringing up a new chip is even for very experienced developers a heartbeat moment. Will the chip get alive at all? Do we have any major bugs? Are all the components integrated correctly? How good does the simulation fit to the real chip?

GigaPHY Data

Chip Technology

• Globalfoundries 22DFX

Automotive Ethernet PHY Instances

• 1x SafeIP^TM SinglePHY 100BASE-T1 22FDX
• 2x SafeIP^TM DualPHY 100/1000BASE-T1 22FDX

Other Interfaces

• 3x SGMII
• 1x GMII/MII
• 1x SPI
• 1x MDIO
• 1x JTAG