MAC Receiver

Zynq UltraScale+ Device Technical Reference Manual (UG1085)

Document ID
UG1085
Release Date
2023-12-21
Revision
2.4 English

All processing within the MAC receiver uses 16-bit datapaths. The MAC receiver checks for valid preamble, FCS, alignment, and length. It then sends the received frames to the FIFO (to either the DMA controller or interface to the PL) and stores the frames destination address for use by the address checking unit.

If, during frame reception, the frame is found to be too long, a bad frame indication is sent to the FIFO. The receiver logic ceases to send data to memory as soon as this condition occurs.

At end of frame reception the receive unit indicates to the DMA controller whether the frame is good or bad. The DMA controller recovers the current receive buffer if the frame is bad.

Ethernet frames are normally stored in memory via the DMA unit or to the FIFO complete with the FCS. Setting the FCS remove bit in the network configuration register (bit [17]) causes frames to be stored without their corresponding FCS. The reported frame length field is reduced by four bytes to reflect this operation.

The receive block signals to the register block to increment the alignment, CRC (FCS), short frame, long frame, jabber or receive symbol errors when any of these exception conditions occur.

If bit [26] is set in the network configuration CRC, errors are ignored and frames with CRC errors are not discarded, though the frame check sequence errors statistic register is still incremented.

Bit [13] of the receiver descriptor word [1] is updated to indicate the FCS validity for the particular frame. This is useful for applications where individual frames with FCS errors must be identified. Received frames can be checked for length field error by setting the length field error frame discard bit of the network configuration register (bit [16]). When this bit is set, the receiver compares a frame's measured length with the length field (bytes 13 and 14) extracted from the frame.

The frame is discarded if the measured length is shorter. This checking procedure is for received frames between 64 bytes and 1,518 bytes in length. 1,536 bytes if bit [8] is set in the network configuration register, 10,240 bytes if bit [3] is set in the network configuration register. Each discarded frame is counted in the 10-bit length field error statistics register.