Re: [ethmac] development of a NIC

[nbase <nbase@nbase.com>]

9-Jun-00

   Hi,

      I have limited experiance with Vhdl (only use it for about 6 month
long ago), as I'm using Verilog, but I already designed in the past two mac
10/100  so if you have question just Email me and I will try to answer.

I strongly suggest you start with block diagrams for Rx a Tx as while you
can use the drawing in opencore siute as a start you should be aware it is
still issing few thing as well as need few correction. also you might want
to add few more capabilities or remove some.

A simple example is the flow control packet that Rx need to be able to
receive in fdx and stop the tx machine for a certain time as well as the Tx
need to be able to send them depend on the free buffer.

once you get the block diargram and it is looking ok as well as have
detailed signals not only arrow going up and down, than you can work on the
state machines and once they seem to be ok you should start coding so there
is still a way to go before the code.

of course there are few modules you can code immidiatly (crc, backoff etc)
but I would recommend that even if you are in a rush to do some coding
first finish the block diargram as it might make few minor changes to even
those simple modules.

have a nice day

   Illan

At 06:17 PM 06/08/2000 +0100, you wrote:
>Hi,
>
>my name is Maik [german version of Mike]. I'm a student at the Dresden
>University of Technology at the Insitute of Computer Engineering. For
>further information please visit my homepage -
>http://www.inf.tu-dresden.de/~mb25.
>
>My current task is the development of an embedded solution for
>transmitting measurement information to a host via Fast-Ethernet. The
>protocol processing (ICMP, IP, UDP) will be done by the PIC which
>provides the measurement data. For the PIC and it's components we always
>habe VHDL models. So now I'm working on a model of the NIC which means
>an 10/100 MBPS Ethernet-MAC. But It isn't easy ;-)
>
>So maybe You can help me and can help You. Do You have some further
>information as are available on the internet ? Do You have some VHDL
>models ? I found none on CVS ...
>
>Do You need any volunteers for Your project ? I'm really interessted !
>But listen, this is my first real hardware project. In the past I did
>Java and C/C++ programming.
>
>
>Thanks and best regards
>Maik Boden
>
>