Implements an Ethernet Media Access Controller compatible with the 10/100 Mbps IEEE 802.3 and 1Gbps IEEE 802.3-2002 specifications. The controller provides half- or full-duplex operation, supports jumbo frames, and optionally provides a useful set of statistics counters enabling station management. Furthermore, the core can optionally be configured with a hardware timestamping unit enabling support for the IEEE 1588 precision time protocol (PTP).
A host processor can control the operation of the core via a slave interface that provides access to its control and status registers. The EMAC-1G features two master ports for data transfers, one for transmit and one for receive. The two DMA engines use buffer descriptors to automatically transfer data from local FIFOs to an external shared memory. The core supports 32-bit AMBA/AHB or Wishbone SoC buses; other bus interfaces are available on request.
Integration with an Ethernet PHY is straightforward, as the controller core supports the Media Independent Interface (MII) and the Gigabit Media Independent Interface (GMII) physical layer interface standards.
The EMAC-1G is production proven in ASIC and FPGA technologies.