Internal Details

I was able to take some shots of the product boards since all the cases had to be opened to access antenna connections. Figure 5 shows the Buffalo router board, which uses a Broadcom BCM4704 processor, BCM5325 10/100 switch, 4 MB of flash and 16 MB of RAM. The radio is on a rather large mini-PCI board that plugs into the main board.

Figure 5: Buffalo WZR-G300N board (Click to Enlarge)

The Netgear WNR854T board is shown in Figure 6. The processor and switch are covered, but Marvell's TopDog pages indicate the processor would be the 88W8360. I'm not sure which gigabit switch chip is used, since it's hidden under a heatsink. 8 MB of flash and 16 MB of RAM and a mini-PCI radio round out the design.

Figure 6: Netgear WNR854T board (Click to Enlarge)

In the Figure 7 photo of Linksys' WRT-300N router board, you can see that most of the circuitry is covered by shields. Note that the Linksys design is physically different from Buffalo's and uses a CardBus radio; probably the same as the WPC-300N, but with different covers.

Figure 7: Linksys WRT-300N board (Click to Enlarge)

Tags: 802.11n,

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