Specs and Design Info

The 200D (and I suspect, other similar devices in the current crop) are manufactured by Ascalade Communications, a Canadian cordless phone OEM / ODM that is reponsible for many of the phones that you know by Ascalade's customers' names. Both the Netgear and Philips phones are made by Ascalade and, I suspect, so are at least some of GE / Thomson's.

Opening up the base station, I found two boards cabled together. The board in Figure 3 holds the LAN interface. I didn't remove the metal shield on this board and the FCC ID pictures don't show this board at all, so I don't know what's under there. I suspect it may be the main processor that runs the Skype client.

Figure 3: SPH200D base station board 1 (click image to enlarge)

Figure 4 shows the other board that has the radio (under the shield at the upper left, which I also didn't remove) and PSTN line interface. The chip at lower left in Figure 4 is an SC14438, which I'm guessing is a variant of the National Semiconductor SC14428 Baseband Processor. The chip incorporates a National 16 bit CompactRISC CR16C Microprocessor, DSP, and four 32 kbit/sec ADPCM transcoders among other features. This processor is also used in Linksys' CIT200 and most likely handles the cordless phone functions and landline A-to-D and D-to-A conversion.

Figure 4: SPH200D base station board 2 (click image to enlarge)

The handset is shown in Figure 5 and appears to use the same SC14438 processor chip and radio module.

Figure 5: SPH200D handset board (click image to enlarge)

Tags: Netgear, Skype, Skype phone, VoIP,

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