Am79C978A

The Am79C978A controller is the first in a series of home networking products from AMD. The Am79C978A controller is fabricated in an advanced low power 3.3 V CMOS process to provide low operating current for power sensitive applications.

The Am79C978A controller contains an Ethernet Controller based on the Am79C971 Fast Ethernet controller, a physical layer device for supporting the 802.3 standard for 10BASE-T, and a physical layer device for data networking at speeds up to 1 Mbps over ordinary residential telephone wiring.

The integrated PCI Ethernet controller is a highly integrated 32-bit full-duplex, 10/100 Mbps Ethernet controller solution designed to address high-performance system application requirements. It is a flexible busmastering device that can be used in any application, including network ready PCs. The bus master architecture provides high data throughput and low CPU and system bus utilization.

The integrated Ethernet transceiver is a physical layer device supporting the IEEE 802.3 standards for 10BASE-T. It provides all of the PHY layer functions required to support 10 Mbps data transfer speeds. The integrated HomePNA transceiver is a physical layer device that enables data networking at speeds up to 1 Mbps over common residential phone wiring regardless of topology and without disrupting telephone (POTS) service.

The 32-bit multiplexed bus interface unit provides a direct interface to the PCI local bus, simplifying the design of an Ethernet or home network node in a PC system. The device has built-in support for both little and big endian byte alignment. The integrated home networking controller's advanced CMOS design allows the bus interface to be connected to either a +5.0 V or a +3.3 V signaling environment. A compliant IEEE 1149.1 JTAG test interface for board level testing is also provided, as well as a NAND tree test structure for those systems that do not support the JTAG interface. The integrated Am79C978A home networking controller is also compliant with the PC98, PC99, and Net PC specifications. It includes the full implementation of the Microsoft OnNow and ACPI specifications, which are backward compatible with Magic Packet technology, and is compliant with the PCI Bus Power Management Interface specification by supporting the four power management states (D0, D1, D2, and D3), the optional PME pin, and the necessary configuration and data registers.

The integrated Am79C978A home networking controller is a complete Ethernet or home network node integrated into a single VLSI device. It contains a bus interface unit, a Direct Memory Access (DMA) Buffer Management Unit, an ISO/IEC 88023 (IEEE 802.3) compliant Media Access Controller (MAC), a Transmit FIFO and a large Receive FIFO, and an IEEE 802.3u compliant MII. Both IEEE 802.3 compliant full-duplex and half-duplex operations are supported on the MII interface. 10/100 Mbps operation is supported through the MII interface.

The integrated Am79C978A home networking controller is register compatible with the LANCE (Am7990) and C-LANCE (Am79C90) Ethernet controllers and all Ethernet controllers in the PCnet Family (except ILACC™ (Am79C900)) , including PCnet -ISA (Am79C960), PCnet-ISA+ (Am79C961), PCnet-ISA II (Am79C961A), PCnet-32 (Am79C965A), PCnet-PCI (Am79C970), PCnet-PCI II (Am79C970A), PCnet FAST (Am79C971), and PCnet-FAST+ (Am79C972). The Buffer Management Unit supports the LANCE and PCnet descriptor software models.

The integrated Am79C978A controller supports autoconfiguration in the PCI configuration space. Additional integrated controller configuration parameters, including the unique IEEE physical address, can be read from an external non-volatile memory (EEPROM) immediately following system reset.

In addition, the Am79C978A controller provides programmable on-chip LED drivers for transmit, receive, collision, link integrity, Magic Packet status, speed, activity, power output, address match, full-duplex, or 100 Mbps status.