SmallNetBuilder

Inside Details

Figure 2 is an photo of the inside of the PLA-400. It's a bit hard to see, but the heart of the product is contained on a connectorized module. The two heatsinks hide the identity of the parts, but one of them for sure is an Intellon INT6000 HomePlug AV PHY/MAC. By the way, those heatsinks really are needed because the PLA-400 gets rather toasty in operation.

Figure 2: PLA-400 board

The underside of the module contains a second Hynix HY57V641620ETP 64Mbit SDRAM chip (for a total of 16MBytes of memory and an ST 25P16V6P 2MB flash chip. An tiny AC201 chip is on the main board under the module, which from the board traces, looks like it handles the 10/100 Ethernet interface.

Because I'll later show some performance data for the Zyxel PL-100 Homeplug 1.0 + Turbo adapter that Zyxel was kind enough to also provide for my interoperability and coexistence tests, Figure 3 shows its innards. As with almost all HomePlug products, it also uses Intellon silicon, this time the INT5500CS HomePlug 1.0 with Turbo chipset, consisting of an INT5500 MAC/PHY and INT1200 analog front end.

Figure 3:PL-100 board

The 5500 chipset needs no external memory, so the only other chips present are an Analog Devices AD8018 5 V, Rail-to-Rail, High Output Current, xDSL Line Driver Amplifier and Realtek RTL8201CP Single-Port 10/100M Fast Ethernet PHYceiver.