Today we’ll be taking a quick look at the Starnet 8 Port 10/100Mbps Ethernet Switch (SH-9008P) which has a date code of 2003/40th week.
4 screws later and we’re in.
Not a whole lot to see as we’d expect, there is a TD34063 which is a variant of the MC34063 SMPS. Other than that, we do have lots very noticeable of via stitching.
We’ve got our main chip with a heatsink on it, it’s the IC+ IP178A with a 25MHz crystal which is very close to the IP178C that the Tenda 8 port switch used so this must have been the go to chip for low cost switches.
Apart from that, all SMD components on the bottom of the board have been glued down with red adhesive to keep them in place when the board was reflowed.
There seems to be unpopulated space on the PCB for the EEPROM. It might be a fun experiment trying to reconfigure switch behavior by adding one. All the information seems to be in the datasheet.