High speed ethernet MAC and PHY apparatus with a filter based ethernet packet router with priority queuing and single or multiple transport stream interfaces

摘要

An audio-visual content delivery system includes an interface to communicate with a local area network (LAN). A packet processing circuit in the system may filter and route Ethernet packet data received from the LAN, to specific ports and/or queues without host processor intervention. The packet processing circuit may utilize a set of filter and routing mechanisms configurable in hardware to interpret various Internet Engineering Task Force networking transport protocols, and may transfer the packet data in a format recognized by a variety of consumer subsystems, each of which may be coupled to the packet processing circuit. The packet processing circuit may be implemented as a semiconductor device, and may allow encapsulated application data to be routed to a plurality of different types of application sinks or processors, forming a point-to-point or multi-point serial or parallel data stream over a standard transport covering numerous levels of the ISO data communications stack.

主权项

1. A method for delivering data, the method comprising:
receiving an Ethernet packet targeted to a host processing unit; filtering the Ethernet packet, comprising identifying routing information corresponding to the Ethernet packet; routing according to the routing information at least a first portion of the Ethernet packet to the host processing unit via a transport stream interface (TSI); wherein the Ethernet packet comprises one or more encapsulation headers according to Ethernet protocol, and wherein said identifying the routing information is performed using information obtained from the one or more encapsulation headers.