USING THE TSWITCH NETWORK MANAGEMENT PORT FOR FRAME I/O BTW TSWITCH DEVICES/CPUS

This application report describes how to use the Texas Instruments (TI(TM)) ThunderSWITCH(TM) Network Management (NM) port for frame I/O between ThunderSWITCH devices and external management entities, that is, a CPU.

The first generation of ThunderSWITCH devices, the TNETX3150 and TNETX3100, provides a DIO bus interface to enable a CPU to gather port statistics, set up the switch configuration, etc. However, these devices provided no integrated support to enable frame transmission/reception between the switch and the CPU. Thus, an additional external MAC device was required to get management frames in and out of the CPU.

The latest generation of ThunderSWITCH devices, the TNETX3270 and TNETX4090, provide an enhanced DIO bus interface that allows frame I/O between the switch and CPU without requiring an external MAC device. The ThunderSWITCH NM port provides the MAC functionality on these ThunderSWITCH devices.

Go to the Engineering Design Center to locate information on other TI Semiconductor devices.

(c) Copyright 1998 Texas Instruments Incorporated. All rights reserved.
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