Fair. I‘m in a train rn, so I can‘t do proper research, but from some marketing material I found, they claim it‘s patented tech. Maybe you can find some patent by „Icron Technologies Corp.“ showing how this works? :)
You could just hook it up to your computer and see what happens in Wireshark. It‘s a proper PHY after all, so no potential for unsafe conditions.
They could be using 2 approaches, either some very simple framing/signalling on the link, basically raw USB bits with extra logic or they could be using Ethernet-ish with custom frames and a state machine/packet handling. I don‘t expect it to be able to survive switching at all.
ha! I actually like this approach :) While writing the previous post I was thinking about ways you could do this in software and all of them had severe flaws — so this solution is sooo much better :)
Huh. There must be even more on the bottom side like a full MCU, right? This looks a job for a full-blown Linux SoC.
Finally got around to assemble this breakout. It is now 21.15589 MHz clock ⏰
😻 Uh!