Hi
Does anyone have any experiences with connecting a MAC rather than a PHY to a spartan(3e).
I don't know yet whether to use a microblaze or my own state machine to connect to the ethernet. For microblaze, xilinx cores seem to want just an external PHY but surely a MAC would offload more stuff from the FPGA.
Any thoughts appreciated.
Regards
Colin
You probably need both.
The PHY is the magic interface to the wire.
The MAC is a digital interface that makes it all look like registers to some cpu. It might be on the PHY chip or it might be a fpga module.
-- Mike Treseler
Colin,
A MAC+PHY costs more then a PHY, but you save the MAC IP cost and gates in the FPGA. It is a good alternative to consider.
Xilinx has a MicroBlaze interface to this type of device, called the EPC. They also have an application note that describes how to use it:
The app note uses a piece of hardware that is no longer available (Avnet P160 Comm 3 module), but you can look at the Spartan-3 Mini- Module which also has the 91C111 MAC+PHY.
Bryan
col> Hi
Bryan
Thanks for your reply, as a result I've made a much better job of searching the xilinx website.
Colin
Although one would logically expect that to be the case, in my experience it isn't always true. I suspect it has to do with the high volume in which PCI Ethernet MAC/PHY chips are used in PCs.
For instance, at one time a Realtek 10/100 MAC/PHY was quoted at a lower price than the Realtek 10/100 standalone PHY, in the same quantity. I don't know if that's still the case.
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