Low Latency 100G Ethernet Intel® FPGA IP Core User Guide: For Intel® Stratix® 10 Devices

ID 683100
Date 2/16/2022
Public
Document Table of Contents

4. Functional Description

The Low Latency 100G Ethernet Intel FPGA IP core implements an Ethernet MAC in accordance with the IEEE 802.3 Ethernet Standard. The IP core handles the frame encapsulation and flow of data between client logic and an Ethernet network through a 100-Gbps Ethernet PCS and PMA (PHY).

In the transmit direction, the MAC accepts client frames, and inserts inter-packet gap (IPG), preamble, start of frame delimiter (SFD), padding, and CRC bits before passing them to the PHY. The MAC also updates the TX statistics counters if they are present. The PHY encodes the MAC frame as required for reliable transmission over the media to the remote end.

In the receive direction, the PHY passes frames to the MAC. The MAC accepts frames from the PHY, performs checks, updates statistics counters if they are present, strips out the CRC, preamble, and SFD, and passes the rest of the frame to the client. In RX preamble pass-through mode, the MAC passes on the preamble and SFD to the client instead of stripping them out. In RX CRC pass-through mode (bit 1 of the CRC_CONFIG register has the value of 1), the MAC passes on the CRC bytes to the client and asserts the EOP signal in the same clock cycle with the final CRC byte.