An Integrated MAC IP Design for IEEE 1394 and Ethernet

In the future digitalized life, both of IEEE 1394 and IEEE 802.3 protocols will be very important and widely applied. The former is adopted by all kinds of digital multimedia devices to obtain high-speed transmissions. The later has been often adapted to construct LANs, and will be popularized to construct WANs. Thus, it is an important issue to simplify the design flow and reduce the time-to-market for integrating these two protocols into the whole system (e.g. SoC). In this paper, we present a new MAC IP, which meets the both specifications of IEEE 1394 Link Layer and IEEE 802.3 MAC Layer. The proposed MAC IP accepts different input parameters, and cooperates with different IEEE 1394 or IEEE 802.3 physical layer to transmit data through the same MAC layer by the communication procedure of IEEE 1394 or IEEE 802.3 mode.