Network transceiver having a LED interface operable in parallel and serial modes

摘要

A novel multi-port network transceiver having an LED interface supporting parallel and serial LED modes. The LED interface has a pair of LED pins for each port. In the parallel LED mode, one pin of this pair represents status of a 10 Mb/s communication, whereas another pin represents status of a 100 Mb/s communication. In the serial LED mode, status information for all ports is transferred using 3 pins supplying a serial data stream, a frame signal and a clock signal. The serial data stream is composed of frames, each of which represents various events for the multiple ports. The frame signal is used to identify the boundary between the frames. The transfer of the serial data stream is synchronous to the clock signal.