The Intelligent Way to Connect

• Dual port single-chip configuration simplifies designs
• Footprint compatibility for flexible designs
• Enhanced manageability and system health monitoring with ASF 1.0 and SMBus 2.0

The Intel® 82546GB Dual Port Gigabit Ethernet Controller incorporates two full Gigabit Ethernet MAC and PHY layer functions and Serializer/ Deserializer (SerDes) on a single, compact component. Packaged in a 21x21mm PBGA, the 82546GB Dual Port Gigabit Ethernet Controller provides dual port functionality without requiring additional board space for the component.

The Intel 82546GB integrates Intel's fourth-generation Gigabit MAC design, with fully integrated, physical-layer circuitry, to provide two standard IEEE 802.3 Ethernet interfaces for 1000BASE-T, 100BASE-TX, and 10BASE-T applications (802.3, 802.3u, 802.3ab). For Ethernet on the backplane and fiber-optic applications, the Intel 82546GB's two integrated SerDes support 1000BASE-X (802.3z). In addition, the controller provides a single, direct Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) 2.3 and PCI-X 1.0a compliant bus that operates as a single multi-function device on the bus at clock frequencies up to 133MHz.

The Intel 82546GB on-board SMBus port enables enhanced manageability and system health monitoring via the LAN. With SMBus, management packets can be routed to or from a management processor. The SMBus port enables industry standards such as IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) to be implemented with the 82546GB. In addition, ASF 1.0 (Alert Standard Format) circuitry provides alerting and remote-control capabilities with standardized interfaces.

The Intel 82546GB Gigabit Ethernet Controller architecture is optimized to deliver both high-performance networking and PCI/PCI-X bus efficiency. Using state logic design with a pipelined DMA Unit and 128-bit-wide buses for the fastest performance, the 82546GB controller handles Gigabit Ethernet traffic with low network latency and minimal internal processing overhead. The controller's architecture includes independent transmit and receive queues to limit PCI bus traffic, and a PCI interface that maximizes the use of bursts for efficient bus usage. The Intel 82546GB Gigabit Ethernet Controller prefetches up to 64 packet descriptors in a single burst for efficient PCI-bandwidth usage. Two 64KB on-chip packet buffers maintain superior performance as available PCI bandwidth changes. Advanced interrupt moderation hardware manages interrupts generated by the 82546GB controller to further improve system efficiency. In addition, using hardware acceleration, the controller also offloads tasks from the host processor, such as TCP/UDP/IP checksum calculations and TCP segmentation.