Introduction to switch fabric

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Intoduction to Network Processor

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Introduction to MAC

Medium Access Control  (MAC) is connected to PHY via Media Independent Interface (MII)  toward network side. MII could be GMII, XGMII, XLGMII or CGMII, and it depends on the speed --- 1GbE, 10GbE, 40GbE or 100GbE. On the other end, MAC is connected to host via TX FIFO or RX FIFO.   In most implementation,  MAC consists of Reconciliation Sublayer, RX control, TX control,  Receive FIFO, TX FIFO, Time stamping,  Configuration and Statistics registers, and MDIO master.  The RS is responsible for spraying packets onto the interface defined by MII and local/remote fault stuff.

Introduction to PHY

PHY is the physical layer of OSI network model.  PHY consists of 3 sublayer generally -- PCS (Physical Coding Sublayer, PMA (Physical Medium Attachment Sublayer) and PMD (Physical Medium Dependent Sublayer).  On one end,  PHY is connected to optical transceivers or RJ45 jack directly; On the other end, PHY is connected to MAC.

Introduction to transceivers

In switch or router, the first component customers facing is optical transceiver, which is used to connected optical fibre to PHY or EDCs inside switch/router. Transceiver is the device to convert optical signal to electrical signal, which could be processed by modern switch/router. The following is one list of optical transceivers commonly used in networking industry.

1. GBIC(10M/100M/1000M)
2. SFP/mini-GBIC(10M/100M/1000M)
3. XENPAK(10G)
4. X2(10G)
5. XFP(10G)
6. SFP+(10G)
7. QSFP(40G)
8. CXP(100G)
9. CFP(100G)