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Thunderbolt has at all times been a functionally proprietary expertise, held secret by Intel till “opening” the usual in a means that evidently wasn’t sufficient for anybody to meaningfully take part. A minimum of, till final 12 months, after we noticed bulletins about ASMedia creating two chips for Thunderbolt use. Now, we’re beginning to see open supply, letting us tinker with PCIe at costs decrease than $100 per endpoint.
Specifically, this board from Reddit makes use of the ASM2464PD — a chipset that helps TB3/4/USB4, and provides you a 4x PCIe hyperlink. Harnessing the 40 Gbps energy to wire up an NVMe SSD, this board exhibits us it’s very a lot attainable to design a totally practical ASM2464PD board whereas going solely off no matter scarce knowledge is obtainable to the general public. With minimal footprint that hardly extends past the 2230 SSD it’s designed for, curved hint format, and a CNC-milled case, this board units a excessive customary for a DIY Thunderbolt implementation.
The principle downside is that this mission shouldn’t be open-source – all we get is fairly photos and a little bit of technical information. Fortunately, we’ve additionally seen [WifiCable] take up the mantle of creating this chip really hobbyist-available – she’s created an emblem, match a footprint, and made an instance board in KiCad retracing [Picomicro]’s steps in a pleasant trend. The board is at present incomplete as a result of it wants somebody to purchase an ASM2464PD enclosure on Aliexpress and reverse-engineer the lacking circuitry, but when open-source Thunderbolt gadgets are in your want record, that is as shut as you get at the moment – perhaps you’ll be capable to make an eGPU adapter, even. Within the meantime, in the event you don’t need to develop {hardware} however need to benefit from Thunderbolt, you may construct 10 Gbps point-to-point networks.
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