Another punt in the rummage sales of fleabay has paid dividends! This time, a 99p flutter bagged a brand new 2Wire 1800HG Home Gateway.
And what a beauty she is! On looks alone, the 1800HG is a ‘must have’ for any serious collector of broadband access equipment.
Enough of the lads’ talk. We have work to do – this little stunner needs to be slipped from her robes so we can ogle her vital stats.
Boy, does she play hard to get! Hopefully, the photos reveal the best tactic for weaseling your way into her inner sanctum..
A few points of note..
The CPU is a 2Wire Medusa. This is one of the earlier TriMedia TM3260 cores and supports only single rate DRAM.
Externally, the device is labelled as a 2Wire 1800HG and yet the label stuck over the CPU reads 1801HG.
Photographs taken of an earlier model of the 1800HG have revealed a non-standard flash IC on the PCB.[1]
The flash memory on those older boards was from M-Systems (now SanDisk) who marketed it as a DiskOnChip device. While those flash ICs were still in a TSOP-48 package, they had non-standard pinouts and used a proprietary on-chip controller for wear-levelling and other features. [2]
Fortunately, the more recent models of the 1800HG, like the one below, rely on an industry-standard NAND flash IC with standard ONFI pinouts and the standard ONFI command set.
In the case of this particular BT-branded model of 2Wire, the flash IC is the NAND128W3A, a 128Mbit x8 NAND device from STMicro. [3]
In the 1800HG, we find the hallmark card edge connector that is present on most 2Wire devices for JTAG and i2c, as well as a 24c32 boot ROM to hold the code for the first stages of the bootstrap process.
[2] https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B6wW18mYskvBM2JmMzAzNDItZGJhMi00NTNmLWIwZGYtNzc1YjhhMjQ4YTZi
[3] https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B6wW18mYskvBM2JmMzAzNDItZGJhMi00NTNmLWIwZGYtNzc1YjhhMjQ4YTZi
