Single-Chip NIC Solutions?

scdeimos asks: "I started out working life as an electrical engineer, but subsequently moved into software development due to the lack of 'interesting' design jobs in the EE industry...one manufactory/power plant control system is much like another. Nowadays I find myself heading back to electronics as the field becomes more and more interesting with PIC?s and STAMP?s that are more powerful than many desktop systems were just a few years ago. Companies like Future Technology Devices International make useful single-chip USB solutions that allow your hack to appear as a serial port (FT232BM) or a parallel port (FT245BM) connected to your favourite CPU for device intelligence. This lets you build useful test equipment like computer-controlled voltmeters, logic analyzers and CRO?s for not much outlay.Which brings me to my question, which centers around NIC solutions. What are people using out there today for providing single-chip NIC connectivity? What benefits do you feel your chip preference has over the competition? Do any have a sockets (TCP/UDP) implementation built-in, or do you still have to write your own protocol libraries in the support CPU?"

Comments

Beware the curly apostrophe!

[fm6]

PIC?s and STAMP?s

Either the editors should watch out for 8-bit characters, or the Slash code should accept the entire Latin1 character set. The headers say that Slashdot does 8-bit characters, but this is a lie. And translating them to question marks is one of the more benign things it does with them.

Netgear

[rollingrock]

Netgear claims to have a NIC with a single chip.

IANAEE but it appears that there are two on there tho.