CS8900A
Crystal LAN™ Ethernet Controller
4.0 PACKETPAGE ARCHITECTURE
4.1 PacketPage Overview
PacketPage
Address
Contents
0400h
0A00h
Receive Frame Location
Transmit Frame Location
The CS8900A architecture is based on a
unique, highly-efficient method of accessing
internal registers and buffer memory known as
PacketPage. PacketPage provides a unified
way of controlling the CS8900A in Memory or
I/O space that minimizes CPU overhead and
simplifies software. It provides a flexible set of
performance features and configuration op-
tions, allowing designers to develop Ethernet
circuits that meet their particular system re-
quirements.
4.1.2 Bus Interface Registers
The Bus Interface registers are used to config-
ure the CS8900A’s ISA-bus interface and to
map the CS8900A into the host system’s I/O
and Memory space. Most of these registers
are written only during initialization, remaining
unchanged while the CS8900A is in normal
operating mode. The exceptions to this are the
DMA registers which are modified continually
whenever the CS8900A is using DMA. These
registers are described in more detail in
Section 4.3 on page 44.
4.1.1 Integrated Memory
Central to the CS8900A architecture is a 4-
Kbyte page of integrated RAM known as Pack-
etPage memory. PacketPage memory is used
for temporary storage of transmit and receive
frames, and for internal registers. Access to
this memory is done directly, through Memory
space operations (Section 4.9 on page 73), or
indirectly, through I/O space operations
(Section 4.10 on page 75). In most cases,
Memory Mode will provide the best overall per-
formance, because ISA Memory operations
require fewer cycles than I/O operations. I/O
Mode is the CS8900A’s default configuration
and is used when memory space is not avail-
able or when special operations are required
4.1.3 Status and Control Registers
The Status and Control registers are the pri-
mary means of controlling and getting status of
the CS8900A. They are described in more de-
tail in Section 4.4 on page 49.
4.1.4 Initiate Transmit Registers
The TxCMD/TxLength registers are used to
initiate Ethernet frame transmission. These
registers are described in more detail in
Section 4.5 on page 69. (See Section 5.6 on
page 99 for a description of frame transmis-
sion.)
(e.g. waking the CS8900A from the Software 4.1.5 Address Filter Registers
Suspend State requires the host to write to the
CS8900A’s assigned I/O space).
The Filter registers store the Individual Ad-
dress filter and Logical Address filter used by
the Destination Address (DA) filter. These reg-
isters are described in more detail in
Section 4.6 on page 71. For a description of
the DA filter, see Section 5.2.10 on page 87.
The user-accessible portion of PacketPage
memory is organized into the following six sec-
tions:
PacketPage
Address
Contents
4.1.6 Receive and Transmit Frame Loca-
tions
0000h - 0045h
0100h - 013Fh
0140h - 014Fh
0150h - 015Dh
Bus Interface Registers
Status and Control Registers
Initiate Transmit Registers
Address Filter Registers
The Receive and Transmit Frame PacketPage
locations are used to transfer Ethernet frames
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