Hi, As part of a design that I'm investigating, I am looking at connecting a number of FPGA based MACs to a dedicated broadcom switch chip. The difficulty with this is that to interface both chips, I need to have two closely coupled and redundant PHY . Is it possible to connect two MAC (SGMII) directly point-to-point, bypassing the PHY completely? Or is it necessary to have at least some PHY functionality, even if it is a point to point link? Kind regards, Stephen
Steve wrote: > Hi, > > As part of a design that I'm investigating, I am looking at connecting > a number of FPGA based MACs to a dedicated broadcom switch chip. The > difficulty with this is that to interface both chips, I need to have > two closely coupled and redundant PHY . > > Is it possible to connect two MAC (SGMII) directly point-to-point, > bypassing the PHY completely? Or is it necessary to have at least some > PHY functionality, even if it is a point to point link? I suppose it works. Cross connect RXD[] to TXD[]. Cross connect RX_DV to TX_EN, and provide a 125 MHz clock (could be supplied from another FPGA pin)
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On Feb 12, 9:01=A0pm, Steve <stephe...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi, > > As part of a design that I'm investigating, I am looking at connecting > a number of FPGA based MACs to a dedicated broadcom switch chip. =A0The > difficulty with this is that to interface both chips, I need to have > two closely coupled and redundant PHY . > > Is it possible to connect two MAC (SGMII) directly point-to-point, > bypassing the PHY completely? Or is it necessary to have at least some > PHY functionality, even if it is a point to point link? > Generally, It should be possible if you have your MAC with some basic PHY within it. Some PHYs are not replacable and theire requirement is a must. I think, PHYs cannot be bypassed so easily. Karthik Balaguru