Lab 6: Ethernet Packet Sending/Receiving
62
Chapter
10
Chapter 10
Lab 6: Ethernet Packet
Sending/Receiving
Ethernet communication is essential to many digital products such as set-top box
and home gateway. In this lab, we will show how to send and receive Ethernet
packets using the Fast Ethernet controller on DE2 board.
10-1
Design Descriptions
In this project, NIOS II CPU sends and receives Ethernet packets using DM9000A
Ethernet PHY/MAC Controller. Users can either use a loopback device or connect
two DE2 boards to implement this project.
In the transmitting side, NIOS II CPU sends out a 64-byte packet every 0.5sec to
the DM9000A. After receiving the packet, DM9000A appends the 4-byte
checksum information to the packet and send it to the Ethernet port.
In the receiving side, DM9000A checks every single packet received to see if the
destination MAC address in the packet is identical to the MAC address of the DE2
board. If the packet received does have the same MAC address or is a broadcast
packet, DM9000A will receive the packet and sent an interrupt to the NIOSII CPU.
Once the NIOSII CPU has received the interrupt, it will display the packet content
in the NIOS II IDE console window.
