Anyone used the Wiznet ethernet chips?

[nctnico]

@technix: In my experience it depends very much on who is asking to get information or not. Getting information may be easy for you but impossible for people from outside China. And even then if you can't read Chinese then you're often stuck with Chinglish -no offense intended; just stating a fact- and that makes it very hard if not impossible to use a chip. I work with together with Chinese developers on some projects and communication is difficult.

Anyway it seems the project got a go so I'll probably be making a prototype using the Wiznet W5500 in the next weeks.

[technix]

@technix: In my experience it depends very much on who is asking to get information or not. Getting information may be easy for you but impossible for people from outside China. And even then if you can't read Chinese then you're often stuck with Chinglish -no offense intended; just stating a fact- and that makes it very hard if not impossible to use a chip. I work with together with Chinese developers on some projects and communication is difficult.

Anyway it seems the project got a go so I'll probably be making a prototype using the Wiznet W5500 in the next weeks.

If you would like to pay me I can cooperate with you when dealing with such chips. I am Chinese but my English is almost as good as native - a bit of New Yorker and a bit of la la land maybe, in fact.

You can contract me to translate documentation, obtain parts (some company may or may not offer their products out of China, but I can always buy it for you and send it over, if you like so) and even design the software (I do major in CS instead of EE as you may expect, EE is more of a hobby and side project when CS side is uninteresting.)

[diyaudio]

I keep seeing mention of allwinner aXX products, I also noticed its a "Chinese  supported chip" and this chip has brute force flooded the market and made its way in cheap to medium quality electronic products.. Anyway, the point im  trying to make is this..if you try and Google SDK resources on any allwinner chip details, the platform is sparse and very very nebulous... its also mostly used in China for "their engineers" its a useless platform for English speaking people because majority of its SDK resources is biased to the Chinese space so what use is that to the rest of the world.
 

         

Sorry buddy but I took offense from your comments, and look at the sidebar to find out where I am from, and why I took the offense.
asked Allwinner nicely for documentations.

No offence intended, its just common sense reality.

If you don't feel like tackling the SDK you can just grab the linux-sunxi code and forge ahead - drivers usually does not depend on chip detail thanks to Linux driver layering. Also, you could have

You pitched for Allwinner, can you show equal confidence in their technical documentation, SDKS, Q/A support forums.. this to most people is equally as important as the silicon they design and program against.
 



 

[prasimix]

Hi nctnico and others, I'm wondering if any progress about using W5500 is made or any useful info are found in the meantime. I found that guys from arduino.org decide to use it in their Ethernet 2 shield. Don't know is that just inertia since previous shield was built around W5100 from the same manufacturer or they made extensive research what is available in that price/performance range.
The W5500 looks attractive to me, the price is right and it promised a little bit more then ENC28J60 that I'm currently using and would like to replace with something that has full duplex, auto-negotiation and built-in TCP/IP stack. Does W5500 looks to you like good candidate for that?

[westfw]

are there ANY competing ethernet chips that include a TCP stack?
It's getting pretty common in WiFi modules, but I haven't seen many ethernet products that include TCP/IP...

[megabit]

I've used a w5500 in a project in the last six months - teamed with a Atmel 328p on a custom board and running with an arduino-based toolchain.

I'm not doing anything particularly clever with it - simultaneous web server and MQTT client. No issues to report but it seems to be more reliable than the dodgy w5100 I was using previously. Anecdotally seems a little quicker too but I haven't done any proper tests.

[nctnico]

The project I intended to use the W5500 got cancelled so I still don't have any hands-on experience.

[prasimix]

Thanks everyone for reply. I'm currently waiting for module bought on eBay to see W5500 in action. In the meantime I've checked various schematics and end up with the following one:



There is few details that is still questionable and I'd like to discuss with you:

A) I'm planning to mount RJ-45 connector (with magnetics) Amphenol LMJ2138812S0LOT6C on the separate PCB and use Ethernet cable 30cm long for connection. In that way termination resistors will remain on the PCB where is W5500 and transformers will be on the other side of the cable. I don't know it that permitted.
B) I found on some boards that PMODE inputs are directly connected to +3.3V, when on other pull-up resistors are used. I'd like to skip usage of resistors if possible.
C) Same as detail B but connection could be directly to the Gnd or using pull-down resistors. Again I'd like to skip resistors.

I also found that some use C28, C33 of 6n8 and 10n on receiver's lines (even with additional 22 to 33R for better noise immunity?) and that LED resistors is in some cases extremely high (2K2!) limiting current to couple of mA.

[nctnico]

I know this is an old thread but I'd like to update it with how the story has evolved.
Over the past months I have developed a product which uses the W5500 to have a microcontroller communicate to a network. Based on the advice here I made sure I can power cycle the W5500 and use that ability to provide it with the right power-up / reset timing. Even though the design is on a 2 layer board I managed to have a solid ground plane under the W5500 on the bottom layer and have 2 copper pours for the digital & analog power supply on the top layer. Each power supply pin has a 100nf bypass capacitor.

The software side needed some studying to get going but the wiki pages on Wiznet's website do help. Wiznet claims to have a BSD style socket interface but it takes some additional (lower level) functions to see if there is data available in order not to halt execution. I have tested it by pumping lot's of data through it (flood with large ping packets and UDP packets) and the W5500 seems to hold up pretty well. So far no crashes or odd behaviour.

[Siwastaja]

Bumping this thread for more recent insight.

Usually I have used single-board computers for Internet access but now have an application which must be cost and space optimized and uses very very little Internet bandwidth, basically some short control/status messages over MQTT or possibly just raw TCP socket. It's kinda IoT, but the IoT part is not the "core", the devices are smart and capable even without being connected.

This is also a project which needs to be delivered quickly, yet scale up to possibly quite large volumes, we'll see.

WiFi is unwanted (too much configurability / unreliability, the target audience have routers with at least one free ethernet port), nRF52 MCUs are used for custom 2.4GHz local communications, possibly standard BLE in the future. The nRF52 is very well able to perform all other MCU functions in the system so it's the sole microcontroller. This means the options are either to add some STM32/similar just to perform as TCP/IP/Ethernet layer, or use a "hard wired" chip like the W5500. Benefits of W5500 seem to be good availability, excellent price, one firmware less to develop plus integration of ETH PHY on the same chip for even better cost and area.

Obvious turn-off in $(current_year) is lack of IPv6, go figure.

Any more experience on W5500 / others, or any new chips I should be looking at?

Also as far as I know, the application MCU (Cortex M4 @ 64MHz with 128KB of RAM) should have enough resources to do encryption IMHO (for say, a few hundred bytes a second, building the connection can be accepted to take tens of seconds no problem), and even if not, pre-shared keys is an option, but feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on this.

[nctnico]

AFAIK Wiznet has an IPv6 version nowadays.

[DC1MC]

Yes, it does with relatively low effort, also I only have good words for w5500 lite-

Some examples:
 https://www.mischianti.org/2022/07/13/stm32-ethernet-w5500-with-plain-http-and-ssl-https/

[SiliconWizard]

I have a couple W5500 dev boards that I ordered a while ago. Not evaluated it yet though, but from the docs I read about it and everything else I've heard about TCP/IP ethernet on a MCU and the headaches that come with it, if cost of the extra W5500 and its max throughput is OK with you, I'd go fo this rather than spend hours debugging libraries and browsing forums. Just my 2 cents though.

[nctnico]

I have a couple W5500 dev boards that I ordered a while ago. Not evaluated it yet though, but from the docs I read about it and everything else I've heard about TCP/IP ethernet on a MCU and the headaches that come with it, if cost of the extra W5500 and its max throughput is OK with you, I'd go fo this rather than spend hours debugging libraries and browsing forums. Just my 2 cents though.

I fully agree. Last year I had to use LWIP because I couldn't get chips that allowed me to use a W5500 but LWIP is a complete dissaster compared to how easy the W5500 is to use.

[mikeselectricstuff]

I use the W5500 a lot, though only for UDP.  Very easy to use.
My only complaints are that it doesn't support packet fragmentation for longer UDP payloads, and the memory allocation can only allocate the same amount to TX and RX, so for RX-only applications like mine, half the onboard RAM is wasted, though that's not been an issue in practice for me.

A word of warning, don't use a MEMS oscillator - I found this to cause packet loss, always a proper crystal or crystal oscillator.

[SiliconWizard]

And the W6100 supports IPv6.

[peter-h]

I am working on a 32F4 project with LWIP and I find it solid. It's had many years of development and bug fixing.

The main issue is the same old one with open source software: no real support. You post questions on forums, sometimes you get a reply, quite often somebody tells you that you are a stupid idiot (but he might know something useful), and the real work is in implementing it; in this case doing the code to connect it to your micro's ETH hardware. ST do an appnote on this, which is more or less right.

I am very happy with it. The board is test running 24/7, doing two concurrent (mutex-controlled, due to lack of RAM) MbedTLS processes, plus an HTTP server test-polled at 1Hz, etc. I posted here about all that stuff over the last year or so

My project does not support IPV6 - almost nobody seems to be using it, in LANs. LWIP can be compiled for IPV6 though if needed.

OTOH, a lot of hours has gone into this project. A lot of forum posting and reading. I am not accounting for my time

[tellurium]

Usually I have used single-board computers for Internet access but now have an application which must be cost and space optimized and uses very very little Internet bandwidth, basically some short control/status messages over MQTT or possibly just raw TCP socket. It's kinda IoT, but the IoT part is not the "core", the devices are smart and capable even without being connected.

So I guess there would be only one outbound connection - which is good.
TLS or not TLS?
How much free RAM there is left on that nRF at runtime for networking?

[Siwastaja]

So I guess there would be only one outbound connection - which is good.
TLS or not TLS?
How much free RAM there is left on that nRF at runtime for networking?

One connection strategy would seem the best. If more than one, the rest would be unencrypted local things like MODBUS TCP.

Solid encryption is of course a necessity, still pondering between pre-shared keys vs. public keys. I'd say 60-70KB RAM for networking.

[DC1MC]

Yupiee, the IPv6 mini modules:

https://shop.wiznet.eu/ipv6/wiz610io.html

(the chip itself 2.35€)

Cheers,
DC1MC

EDIT: Added datasheet.

[Siwastaja]

Yupiee, the IPv6 mini modules:

https://shop.wiznet.eu/ipv6/wiz610io.html

(the chip itself 2.35€)

Yes, availability of W6100 looked worse (than W5100) at the usual distributors, but seeing W5100S and W6100 are pin-compatible, designing in either doesn't seem risky. Seeing the manufacturers sells directly is always a huge plus.

EDIT: W5100 is not pin-compatible with W5100S or W6100

[tellurium]

Solid encryption is of course a necessity, still pondering between pre-shared keys vs. public keys. I'd say 60-70KB RAM for networking.

60-70KB should be plenty for a MQTT over TLS, using mbedTLS. If a connection is quiet and does not carry a lot of data, mbedTLS can be tuned for down to 2KB IO buffer size per connection - so overall, including all buffering, I'd say it would be possible to tune the whole thing to use 5-7KB overall.

Wiznet modules have their own TCP stack inside, and provide socket-like interface over SPI.

Alternatively, you can use networking library of ours, https://github.com/cesanta/mongoose - it implements its own stack. On W5500, it reads /writes raw frames, thus bypasses W5500's stack (which makes it possible to use IPv6, and implement more than 8 sockets). It is experimental yet, but we're ready to provide full support for free if you decide to use it. Example app is at https://github.com/cesanta/mongoose/tree/master/examples/arduino/w5500 - let me know if you're up to it!

[peter-h]

On my target, MbedTLS took up 150k of code, and the minimum it runs with (a typical crypto suite) is about 50k. Obviously if you control both ends then this can come down, plus you can use any crypto you like.

If you control both ends, there is no practical difference between using a pre shared key and using PK crypto; in both cases you have to keep a key stored securely somewhere.

And if you use a shared key, then you don't need the massive lump of TLS and its non-deterministic private heap memory allocation You just send the data, encrypting each packet with AES256. A TinyAES256 I use is about 100kbytes/sec and the AES256 which comes with MbedTLS I measured at 800kbytes/sec.

[Siwastaja]

How weird crystal specifications.

W6100 datasheet recommends 500uW drive level. Even more weirdly, W5500 datasheet recommends 59.12uW/MHz, which equals whopping 1500uW at 25MHz. Mouser parametric search lists the highest power crystal in stock as just 1000uW. 500uW is something you can actually get but this already limits the choice and even then the crystal datasheets recommend drive levels in tens of uW. Anyone have any idea what's going on here, I don't remember ever seeing a weirdly high drive level recommendation like this?

EDIT: Large crystals all seem to have too much shunt capacitance, making them fail the calculation for gm_crit as explained in https://docs.wiznet.io/img/products/w5100s/w5100s_crystal_selection_guide_v100e.pdf. Their reference design lists bogus part number for the crystal so that's not helping either. I'm starting to think no suitable crystal for this chip exists, so just have to use something and hope for the best.

EDIT2: Related discussion: https://forum.wiznet.io/t/topic/6112 . Unluckily, the few crystals the poor guy thinks fall within the spec are rated to 100uW max.

EDIT3: Apparently no one has managed to find a crystal that is within specifications. So users must choose one of the following:
1) Pick a large crystal -> ignore gain margin criterion by choosing a crystal with too much ESR, too high Cs, or too high CL, or combination thereof
2) Pick a small crystal -> get stability condition right, but ignore drive level maximum rating of the crystal, likely resulting frequency shift or distortion and thus another source of instability, and/or premature failure of the crystal
3) Pick a small crystal but increase the suggested 0 ohm external series resistance value to lower the drive strength to within the crystal spec -> stability goes out of window again?

By careful choice of parts, it seems I can find crystals which are borderline acceptable, i.e. gain margin criterion some 20-30% off (case 1), or rated max power 300mW (case 2), not too far below 500mW. So maybe it is possible to find a combination which is marginal. The fact these chips are manufactured and sold suggests it has to work with some combination, and probably the specifications are just way too tight and no one questioned them because many designers are not very pedantic but design outside ratings if they so wish.

[nctnico]

In my design I have used an external oscillator. Or to be more specific: a clock output from the microcontroller.