Motorola Surfboard Teardown

Originally posted to Twitter on June 2024: https://x.com/_jasonturley/status/1805782842783547762

Motorola Surfboard SBG6580 tear down thread 🧵

I bought this in 2020 and since upgraded. So I decided to take it apart and learn more about routers. pic.twitter.com/JTmnFJbze1

— Jason Turley (@_jasonturley) June 26, 2024

Motorola Surfboard SBG6580 tear down thread 🧵

I bought this in 2020 and since upgraded. So I decided to take it apart and learn more about routers.

It has 4 Ethernet ports in the back and one coaxial cable port thingy. Below that is the power adapter port.

There are only four screws to remove on the back. I placed them in a candle lid since it’s what I had handy.

The case opens up with a little elbow grease.

Inside is pretty dusty 😷

The board is not being help down by anything and is easily removed.

There are two antennas, two Ethernet transformers, some LEDs, flash memory and a heat sink on the chip.

Here’s one of the antennas. The manufacture specs state these are two MIMO antenna arrays for 2.4 and 5GHz.

MIMO stands for multi input, multi output and enables the antennas to send and receive data simultaneously.

The date on these puppies are 31 May 2011 😳

There are 5 LEDs for the router status icons: power, downstream, upstream, online and WLAN/WPS

Googled ‘FL128P1F’ and it’s the flash memory for the router. I think it’s 128Mb

Not 100% sure what this is but since both the antennas had wires connected to it, I think it supplies their power?

The CPU has a heat sink on top. I was able to pop it off with a flathead screwdriver.

Using the same screwdriver and some rubbing alcohol, I removed enough of the thermal paste to read the chip info.

It’s a QAMLink BCM3380 manufactured by Broadcom

Here’s some specs about the chip courtesy of https://insidegadgets.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/bcm3380.pdf

That’s all for today!

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