General Description
The RTL8196C is an integrated System-on-a-Chip (SoC) Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) that implements a basic L2 5-port Ethernet switch and a high performance CPU. The embedded RISC CPU is an RLX4181, and the clock rate can be up to 400MHz. To improve computational performance, a 16-Kbyte I-Cache, 8-Kbyte D-Cache, 16-K I-MEM, and 8-Kbyte D-MEM are provided. A standard 5-signal P1149.1 compliant EJTAG test interface is supported for CPU testing and software development.
FEATUREs
■ SOC
◆ Embedded RISC CPU, RLX4181 with
16K I-Cache, 8K D-Cache, 16K I-MEM,
8K D-MEM
◆ Supports MIPS-1 ISA, MIPS16 ISA
◆ Clock rate up to 400MHz
◆ Provides a standard 5-signal P1149.1
EJTAG test port
◆ Supports RLX4181 CPU suspend mode
■ L2 Capabilities
◆ Five Ethernet MAC integrated switch
with five 10M/100Mbps physical layers
and transceivers for IEEE 802.3
10Base-T and 100Base-TX
◆ Non-blocking wire-speed reception and
transmission and non-head-of-line
blocking/forwarding
◆ Internal 512Kbit SRAM for packet
buffering
◆ Internal 1024 entry 4-way hash L2 look
up table
◆ Supports source and destination MAC
address filtering
◆ Supports IEEE 802.1x port-based and
MAC-based Network Access Control
◆ Complies with
IEEE 802.3/802.3u/802.1q/802.1d
◆ Flexible full-duplex 802.3x flow control
and optional half-duplex backpressure
flow control
◆ MAC learning supports Shared VLAN
Learning (SVL) and Independent VLAN
Learning (IVL) modes
■ CPU Interface (NIC)
◆ Supports BSD mbuf-like packet structure
with adjustable cluster size (128-byte to
2Kbyte) to provide optimum memory
utilization
◆ Provides the ‘To-CPU reason’ in the
packet header to facilitate packet
processing
◆ The NIC DMA supports multiple
descriptor-ring architecture for QoS
applications (supports 6 RX descriptor
rings and 2 TX descriptor rings)
■ Peripheral Interfaces
◆ Supports one PCI Express Host with
integrated PHY
◆ Supports one 16550 UART
◆ Supports up to 17 GPIO pins
◆ Supports one-port USB 2.0 host interface
◆ Embedded USB PHY
■ Memory Interfaces
◆ Flash (NOR Type)
■ Supports two Flash banks that can be
configured as 8/16-bit bus, 256k/512k
/1M/2M/4M/8M bytes
■ System supports up to 16Mbyte Flash
memory space
■ Boot up from NOR Flash is supported
◆ Flash (SPI Type)
■ Supports 4 channels for SPI Flash
application
■ Boot up from SPI Flash is supported
■ System supports up to 32Mbyte Flash
memory space
◆ SDRAM
■ Supports two SDRAM banks that can
be configured as 2M/4M/8M/16M/
32M/64Mbyte
■ 16-bit SDRAM data bus is supported.
System totally supports up to
128Mbyte SDRAM memory space
■ Supports Green Ethernet
◆ Cable length power saving
◆ Power down power saving
◆ Supports IEEE 802.3az Draft 2.0 Energy
Efficient Ethernet (EEE) for
100Base-TX in full duplex operation,
and 10Base-T in full/half duplex mode
■ Other Add-on-Value Features
◆ Supports Link down power saving in
Ethernet PHY
◆ Supports two hardware timers and one
watchdog timer
◆ Per-port configurable auto-crossover
function
◆ Single 25MHz crystal or 40MHz clock
input
◆ PQFP 128-pin package