Re: MDC/MDIO baseline proposal
Joel,
The intention is that registers within 10GbE devices shall only be accessed
using the new proposal for MDC/MDIO addressing with ST=00 (law_1_0700). These
devices shall ignore MDIO accesses with ST=01 (the 'traditional' MDIO/MDC access
frame defined in Clause 22 of IEEE Std 802.3, 1998 edition).
This will allow 10GbE devices (responding to ST=00) to share the MDIO/MDC bus
with 10/100/1000 PHYs (responding to ST=01).
The two sets of registers are disjoint. An ST=00 access will not access any
10/100/1000 PHY registers and an ST=01 access will not access any of the 10GbE
device registers.
Hope this helps,
Ed Turner,
Clause 33 editor (MDIO/MDC management interface).
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Gentlemen:
I can't quite tell from law_1_0700 whether the new proposal for MDC/MDIO
addressing (ST=00) is a new means of accessing a set of registers which is a
proper superset of those visible using the old (ST=01) method, or whether
the registers visible through these two methods are disjoint. Could one of
the authors set me straight?
Joel H. Dedrick
Director, Marketing
Optical Networking Division
PMC-Sierra, Inc.
(408) 626-2070