PA168/PA1688
PA1688 page changed to http://www.palmmicro.com.
More information:
Palmmicro products mailing list — http://groups.yahoo.com/group/palmmicro
VoIP and Palmmicro products BLOG — http://palmmicro.com/woody/blog.html
AR1688 customer website:
www.digitmat.com
http://www.high-link.cn
http://www.yntx.com
This is low cost VoIP solution, complete with reference design and software that allows you to make cheap ip phones and ATAs.
The CPU is similar to an MCS8051 and operates at max 50 MHz. That is a 8bit CPU ...
to speed it up, it has an on-chip DSP which is ADSP2181 instruction set compatible, operating at 50MHz. The chip has interfaces to RS232, USB, SDRAM, SRAM, AC97 codec and a keypad. An RTL8019 10MBit ethernet chip can easily be connected.
Part of the documentation is gibberish:
Considering about standard MCS8051, there are a 256bits SRAM in core.
The most scope of core can seek is 65536bits of SRAM and 65536 of Program
Flash. There has a 4.5KB SRAM in PA1688, it is an outside SRAM of MCU core
seeked.
Now everything is indeed clear. :-)
Newsflash - January 30, 2007
SecurityFocus is reporting today a security vulnerability in the PA168 chipset that allows a remote attacker to issue administrative commands. The attack seems to be somewhat mitigated by the fact that an attacker can only execute the attack when someone has logged into the phone with the superuser password, but when an attacker is able to do this (and they can automate checking to see if the superuser is logged in) they have control of the phone. No fix is reportedly available but the workarounds are to use router Access Control Lists to restrict access to the phone's web server and also to not put one of these phones directly on the public Internet.
Newsflash
I've just had confirmation from the manufacturers of the PA168 chipset that they are open sourcing their VoIP firmware! It's being released under the BSD licence, and it will be hosted on Source Forge. I've setup a page on the AMP Documentation Wiki until the SourceForge project is set up, and I'll try to keep it as updated as I can.
Actually, this chipset has a number of nice features. It comes with g711, g723.1, g729, iLBC, and gsm codecs. IAX2, H.323, MGCP, Net2Phone, and SIP are well-supported. The voice prompts are available in a number of languages (English and Mandarin are standard, French or German or other custom language is available by request).
Although the code is closed-source, it's pretty easy (compared to most closed-source products) to obtain redacted source for the firmware. Even if you don't have access to the source, the developers are willing to consider widely useful enhancements - for instance I asked about uPnP support, provided the developers with a link to libupnp and they said they'd look into it. Ok, so maybe it will be a while before it arrives, but any other group would have given me the answer "order 200K items and we'll do it" - not very useful for a small-time user.
It supports up to 5 separate SIP registrars, but not simultaneously (you can preset the phone to work with 5 providers, say, FWD and Stanaphone, but only one will register at a time. It's fairly easy, however, to switch among profiles/proxies). ...