Micrel Semiconductor (NASDAQ: MCRL) an industry leader in the design and manufacture of integrated circuits for the analog, power management, and high-speed communications markets, today announced the introduction of its Centaur KS8695P Integrated Multi-Port PCI Gateway Solution. Featuring Micrel’s XceleRouter™ Technology, the KS8695P has been designed to offer the next level of integration, performance, and flexibility to address the wired and wireless residential gateway and small office/home office environments.

The KS8695P integrates a high-performance ARM9® processor with a MMU, Micrel’s third generation, field proven, 5-port managed switch and a 33MHz PCI bridge. As a result, it not only addresses the mainstream 802.11a/b/g secure residential gateway products, but also offers a new platform for creative network equipment manufacturers to differentiate themselves with innovative PCI applications.

“Micrel has a market-leading Ethernet product family for small office/home office (SOHO) and residential gateway, networking, wireless LAN and Fiber-to-the-Home applications,” said Mark Downing, Vice President of Marketing for Micrel.

“The Centaur KS8695P with XceleRouter™ Technology provides the market with a new type of connectivity and flexibility that meets the high demands of today’s rich entertainment and media-centric home networks,” he adds.

The Centaur family is the industry’s first high-performance, ARM9® multi-port integrated gateway solution. With its XceleRouter™ Technology and a 166 MHz CPU, the Centaur family of network processors are capable of providing near wire-speed (100Mbps) WAN to LAN routing performance, nearly six times the routing performance of a typical gateway product.

The KS8695P platform is supported by a complete hardware and software reference design to accelerate ODM/OEM time to market. The reference includes an evaluation board, with board support package, open source Linux based Residential Gateway software, OrCAD schematics, and extensive design collateral.

The KS8695P comes in a sleek, space efficient 289 PBGA package, and is available for less than $16 each in 10,000 piece quantities.

Summary of Features:
Centaur KS8695P Integrated Multi-port Gateway Solution

• 166 MHz ARM922T CPU core with the computing power to support Firewall, VPN, internet content filtering, remote management, and other value-added software. The ARM922T includes a Memory Management Unit, which is required for embedded operating systems such Linux and WinCE®.
• Integrated 32 bit, 33 MHz PCI Bridge supporting 3 external masters and host or guest mode to address 802.11 a/b/g wireless LAN router applications. The flexibility of the PCI bridge brings new possibilities of convergence to the residential gateway.
• Integrated KS8995M 5 port managed switch with advanced features such as Tag-based VLAN and Quality of Service (QoS) to segregate and prioritize network traffic.
• XceleRouter™ Technology provides hardware enhanced packet processing to achieve near wire-speed WAN to LAN routing, and relieve CPU burden.
• Patented Low Power PHY technology allows for a smaller, more cost effective power supply and on board power distribution circuitry, and removes the need for a heat sink.

Micrel Semiconductor is a leading manufacturer of advanced, high performance communications, clock management, Ethernet switch and physical layer transceiver, mixed signal, analog and power ICs. These products include devices for fiber-optic telecommunications and networking, cellular telephones, servers, portable computer systems, computer peripherals, process control systems, consumer electronics and power supplies.