Introduction
ROBO-603 User’s Manual
1-15
1.4.12 Ethernet
The Ethernet interfaces are based on two Intel 82559ER Ethernet controllers, which support both
100Mbit as well as l0Mbit Base-T interface.
The Ethernet controllers are attached to the PCI bus and use PCI bus mastering for data transfer.
The CPU is thereby not loaded during the actual data transfer.
The 82559ER is part of Intel's second generation family of fully integrated 10BASE-T /
100BASE-TX LAN solutions. The 82559ER consists of both the Media Access Controller (MAC)
and the physical layer (PHY) combined into a single component solution. 82559 family members
build on the basic functionality of the 82558 and contain power management enhancements.
The 82559ER is a 32-bit PCI controller that features enhanced scatter-gather bus mastering
capabilities, which enables the 82559ER to perform high-speed data transfers over the PCI bus. The
82559ER bus master capabilities enable the component to process high-level commands and
perform multiple operations, thereby off-loading communication tasks from the system CPU. Two
large transmit and receive FIFOs of 3 Kbytes each help prevent data underruns and overruns,
allowing the 82559ER to transmit data with minimum interframe spacing (IFS).
The 82559ER can operate in either full duplex or half duplex mode. In full duplex mode the
82559ER adheres to the IEEE 802.3x Flow Control specification. Half duplex performance is
enhanced by a proprietary collision reduction mechanism.
The 82559ER includes a simple PHY interface to the wire transformer at rates of 10BASE-T and
100BASE-TX, and Auto-Negotiation capability for speed, duplex, and flow control. These features
and others reduce cost, real estate, and design complexity.
The 82559ER also includes an interface to a serial (4-pin) EEPROM and a parallel interface to a
128 Kbyte Flash memory. The EEPROM provides power-on initialization for hardware and
software configuration parameters
