
40 of 128
April, 2002
L84302 Quad 4-Port Ethernet Controller - Technical Manual
Copyright 1997-2002 by LSI Logic Corporation. All rights reserved.
interrupt function is enabled. Refer to
Section 3.9, “Packet Discard,”
page 41
, for more information about discards. The device can be
programmed to not discard and subsequently accept all packets
corrupted by overflow by setting the RX FIFO overflow bit in the RX
Command register.
3.7.5 Discards
Certain error conditions detected for a given packet will cause the all the
data to be discarded or flushed from the RX FIFO. Packet discards are
described in more detail in
Section 3.9, “Packet Discard,” page 41
.
3.8 Collision
3.8.1 General
Collisions occur when transmission and reception occur at the same time
on the physical media. Collisions on the physical media are detected by
an external Physical Layer device and indicated to the L84302 by the
assertion of the COL pin on the PHY interface for that port. A collision
causes the transmission of a packet to be halted and automatically
retransmitted later, according to the backoff algorithm.
Collisions apply only to Half Duplex mode; in Full Duplex mode, the
collision function is disabled and the COL pin is ignored.
3.8.2 Backoff and Retransmission
When a collision is signaled to the device from the PHY during the first
512 bits of a transmit packet, the backoff algorithm halts transmission for
a predetermined amount of time, per IEEE 802.3 specification. This
predetermined interval is called the
backoff interval
. The backoff interval
is a random number that is an exponential function of the number of
times a collision has occurred while attempting to transmit a particular
packet. After the backoff internal has expired, the packet is automatically
retransmitted.
The random number generator used by the backoff algorithm can be
reset separately for each port by setting the backoff counter reset bit in
the Configuration 3 register.