Method and apparatus providing a multiport physical interface to high speed packet networks

摘要

The invention discloses a method and an apparatus for implementing the physical interface in a network element connected to a packet network such as Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) network. With the solution of the invention, the physical interface functions can be integrated on one chip for more than one network port. The physical interface is provided between port bit streams at media speed and word data flow transferred onto/from a bus which is under the control of the network equipment. The solution of the invention includes grouping logics and storage elements by islands of more than one port. Furthermore, the logics and storage elements for statistical counting operations can be grouped for a processing generalized to all ports. Finally, the solution of the present invention takes into account two characteristics of the physical interface which are the different rates between network link media speed and bus access rate and the technology of the high density static imbedded RAMs used for hardware integration. The Flip/Flop pointer RAMs of Flip/Flop data RAMs are duplicated and some interface RAMs are created to transfer control data between the islands and the generalized processing logical blocks.