Ethernet (ETH): media access control (MAC) with DMA controller
RM0090
1132/1731
DocID018909 Rev 11
frame is being transmitted. As soon as the first frame has been transferred and the
status is received from the MAC, it is pushed to the DMA. If the DMA has already
completed sending the second packet to the FIFO, the second transmission must wait
for the status of the first packet before proceeding to the next frame.
Retransmission during collision
While a frame is being transferred to the MAC, a collision event may occur on the MAC line
interface in Half-duplex mode. The MAC would then indicate a retry attempt by giving the
status even before the end of frame is received. Then the retransmission is enabled and the
frame is popped out again from the FIFO. After more than 96 bytes have been popped
towards the MAC core, the FIFO controller frees up that space and makes it available to the
DMA to push in more data. This means that the retransmission is not possible after this
threshold is crossed or when the MAC core indicates a late collision event.
Transmit FIFO flush operation
The MAC provides a control to the software to flush the Transmit FIFO through the use of Bit
20 in the Operation mode register. The Flush operation is immediate and the Tx FIFO and
the corresponding pointers are cleared to the initial state even if the Tx FIFO is in the middle
of transferring a frame to the MAC Core. This results in an underflow event in the MAC
transmitter, and the frame transmission is aborted. The status of such a frame is marked
with both underflow and frame flush events (TDES0 bits 13 and 1). No data are coming to
the FIFO from the application (DMA) during the Flush operation. Transfer transmit status
words are transferred to the application for the number of frames that is flushed (including
partial frames). Frames that are completely flushed have the Frame flush status bit (TDES0
13) set. The Flush operation is completed when the application (DMA) has accepted all of
the Status words for the frames that were flushed. The Transmit FIFO Flush control register
bit is then cleared. At this point, new frames from the application (DMA) are accepted. All
data presented for transmission after a Flush operation are discarded unless they start with
an SOF marker.
Transmit status word
At the end of the Ethernet frame transfer to the MAC core and after the core has completed
the transmission of the frame, the transmit status is given to the application. The detailed
description of the Transmit Status is the same as for bits [23:0] in TDES0. If IEEE 1588 time
stamping is enabled, a specific frames’ 64-bit time stamp is returned, along with the transmit
status.
Transmit checksum offload
Communication protocols such as TCP and UDP implement checksum fields, which helps
determine the integrity of data transmitted over a network. Because the most widespread
use of Ethernet is to encapsulate TCP and UDP over IP datagrams, the Ethernet controller
has a transmit checksum offload feature that supports checksum calculation and insertion in
the transmit path, and error detection in the receive path. This section explains the operation
of the checksum offload feature for transmitted frames.
Note:
The checksum for TCP, UDP or ICMP is calculated over a complete frame, then inserted
into its corresponding header field. Due to this requirement, this function is enabled only
when the Transmit FIFO is configured for Store-and-forward mode (that is, when the TSF bit