PM7385 FREEDM-84A672
DATA SHEET
PMC-1990114
ISSUE 6
84 LINK, 672 CHANNEL FRAME ENGINE AND DATA LINK MANAGER
WITH ANY-PHY PACKET INTERFACE
8.8 Transmit HDLC Controller / Partial Packet Buffer
The Transmit HDLC Controller / Partial Packet Buffer block (THDL672) contains
a partial packet buffer for Tx APPI latency control and a transmit HDLC controller.
The THDL672 also contains logic to monitor the full/empty status of each channel
FIFO and push this status onto the polling interface signals.
The THDL672 requests data from the TAPI672 in response to control information
from the TAPI672 indicating the channel for which data is available and ready to
be transferred. Packet data received from the TAPI672 is stored in channel
specific FIFOs residing in the partial packet buffer. When the amount of data in a
FIFO reaches a programmable threshold, the HDLC controller is enabled to
initiate transmission. The HDLC controller performs flag generation, bit stuffing
and, optionally, frame check sequence (FCS) insertion. The FCS is software
selectable to be CRC-CCITT or CRC-32. The minimum packet size, excluding
FCS, is two bytes. A single byte payload is illegal. The HDLC controller delivers
data to the Transmit Channel Assigner block (TCAS672) on demand. A packet in
progress is aborted if an under-run occurs. The THDL672 is programmable to
operate in transparent mode where packet data retrieved from the TAPI672 is
transmitted verbatim.
8.8.1 Transmit HDLC Processor
The HDLC processor is a time-slice state machine which can process up to 672
independent channels. The state vector and provisioning information for each
channel is stored in a RAM. Whenever the TCAS672 requests data, the
appropriate state vector is read from the RAM, processed and finally written back
to the RAM. The HDLC state-machine can be configured to perform flag
insertion, bit stuffing and CRC generation. The HDLC processor requests data
from the partial packet processor whenever a request for channel data arrives.
However, the HDLC processor does not start transmitting a packet until the entire
packet is stored in the channel FIFO or until the FIFO free space is less than the
software programmable limit. If a channel FIFO under-runs, the HDLC processor
aborts the packet, generates a microprocessor interrupt and signals the
underflow to the transmit Any-PHY interface.
The configuration of the HDLC processor is accessed using indirect channel read
and write operations. When an indirect operation is performed, the information is
accessed from RAM during a null clock cycle inserted by the TCAS672 block.
Writing new provisioning data to a channel resets the channel’s entire state
vector.
PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL TO PMC-SIERRA, INC., AND FOR ITS CUSTOMERS’ INTERNAL USE
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PMC [ PMC-SIERRA, INC ]
