Yeah the era of non-Ethernet/Wi-Fi NICs died off decades ago with the last ADSL cards. Nowadays I'm not sure if OSes even support creating drivers for anything non-Ethernet (especially where to provide the config UI for your non-standard protocol).
What I've seen done recently to work around this is to combine your custom chip with a standard Ethernet NIC on the same board. The computer just sees an (off-the-shelf) NIC that's always connected, and all configuration happens via IP by browsing to a specific private IP (this kinda insists on NAT though).
Linux would support it for sure. It even still has support for several old NICs (it was only the other day I saw a news item about some old protocol from the early 90s finally being removed). But I can imagine no one wants to develop a new such driver.
And if you want to sell to consumers you need Windows and Mac support, and then it easier to just adapt to existing interfaces.
Yeah the era of non-Ethernet/Wi-Fi NICs died off decades ago with the last ADSL cards. Nowadays I'm not sure if OSes even support creating drivers for anything non-Ethernet (especially where to provide the config UI for your non-standard protocol).
What I've seen done recently to work around this is to combine your custom chip with a standard Ethernet NIC on the same board. The computer just sees an (off-the-shelf) NIC that's always connected, and all configuration happens via IP by browsing to a specific private IP (this kinda insists on NAT though).
Linux would support it for sure. It even still has support for several old NICs (it was only the other day I saw a news item about some old protocol from the early 90s finally being removed). But I can imagine no one wants to develop a new such driver.
And if you want to sell to consumers you need Windows and Mac support, and then it easier to just adapt to existing interfaces.