A PROCESSING METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR ETHERNET DEVICE

摘要

Disclosed in the present invention are an Ethernet device and a message processing method. The device including a Physical Coding Sub-layer(PCS) module and a Physical Media Access(PMA) Sub-layer, is characterized in that the physical chip also includes a Low Power Idle(LPI) control client module and a TimeStamp module, and when the Physical Layer(PHY) chip is waked up from an idle state, the LPI control client module caches the received message and sends it to the PCS module; the PCS module encodes the message and sends it to the TimeStamp module; the TimeStamp module appends a tag with timestamp information to the coded message and sends the message to the PMA sub-module, wherein the timestamp information is used for indicating the time when the PHY chip sends the message. The present invention enables the PHY chip to support IEEE Energy Efficiency Ethernet (EEE) function and 1588 function at the same time. Besides, the present invention also provides a choosing mechanism between the EEE function and the 1588 function.