The Ethernet module is make up of 3 important blocks, namely the DMA, MTL and Core (See attached picture)
- The ETH DMA allows the application to define a region of RAM to be used as transmit and receive buffers. DMA transfers are initiated by DMA descriptors which are also held in RAM.
- The ETH MAC Transaction Layer (MTL) acts as a bridge between the application and the ETH Core. The MTL provides two 2K byte FIFO’s to buffer the transmit and receive frames.
- The ETH-Core takes user provided data frames and formats them for transmission to an external PHY via an MII or RMII interface.
