Description
The Intel® Ethernet Controller I210 provides a full-featured Gigabit Ethernet Media Access Control (MAC) and Physical-Layer (PHY) for Desktop, Server, and Embedded Applications. This controller is ideal for embedded applications such as industrial automation, in-vehicle infotainment, medical, print imaging, telecommunications infrastructure, and for military.
The I210 supports advanced features such as Audio-Video Bridging (AVB), IEEE 802.1AS precision timestamping, Error Correcting Code (ECC) Packet Buffers, and Enhanced Management Interface options.
The fully integrated GbE MAC/PHY capabilities can be configured for either 1000 Mb/s or 10/100 Mb/s modes of operation. The I210 enables a quick migration from custom interconnects to Ethernet.
Performance Optimization Capabilities
The Intel® Ethernet Controller I210 contains four transmit and four receive queues for the single port. These queues offer Error Correcting Memory (ECC) protection for improved data reliability. The controller efficiently manages packets with minimum latency by combining parallel and pipelined logic architectures optimized for these independent transmit and receive queues.
These queues, combined with Receive Side Scaling (RSS) and Message Signal Interrupt Extension (MSI-X) support, provide a toolset for optimizing the performance on multi-core processor designs.
Advanced interrupt-handling features to manage multiple interrupts simultaneously, combined with intelligent filtering, ordering, and directing of packets to specific queues and cores, enables load-balancing the network traffic flows to improve throughput in Multi-core platforms.
Other performance-enhancing features include IPv4 and IPv6 checksum offload, TCP/UDP checksum offload, extended Tx descriptors for more offload capabilities, up to 256 KB TCP segmentation (TSO v2), header splitting, 40 KB packet buffer size, and 9.5 KB Jumbo Frame support.
Advanced Features | Audio-Video Bridging (AVB)
Supports IEEE 802.1Qav Audio-Video Bridging (AVB) for customers that require tightly controlled media stream synchronization, buffering, and reservation. The 802.1Qav is part of the AVB specification that provides a way to guarantee bounded latency and latency variation for time-sensitive traffic and includes:
- Timing and Synchronization for time-specific applications (802.1AS)
- Stream Reservation (SR) protocol to guarantee the resources needed for Audio/Video (AV) streams (802.1Qat)
- Forwarding and queueing enhancements for time-sensitive streams (802.1Qav)
IEEE 1588/802.1AS Timestamping
Supports IEEE 1588/802.1AS for precision timestamping of packets. IEEE 1588 provides a mechanism for clock synchronization requirements of measurement and control systems. The protocol supports system-wide synchronization accuracy in the submicrosecond range with minimal network and local clock computing resources. The protocol is spatially localized and allows simple systems to be installed and operate. The IEEE 802.1AS standard specifies the protocol used to ensure that synchronization requirements are met for time-sensitive applications, such as audio and video, across bridged and Virtual Bridged Local Area Networks (VBLAN) consisting of LAN media where the transmission delays are essentially fixed and symmetrical.
Flexible Filters
Supports a total of eight individually configurable flexible filters. Filters can be used for wake-up or proxying when in D3 state or for queueing when in D0 state.
- IEEE 802.1Qav Audio-Video Bridging (AVB) for tightly controlled media stream synchronization, buffering and reservation
- Hardware-based timestamping of IEEE 1588 and 802.1AS packets
- Innovative power management features including Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE) and DMA Coalescing
- Supports commercial and industrial temperature applications
- MDI (Copper) standard IEEE 802.3 Ethernet interface for 1000BASE-T, 100BASE-TX, 10BASE-T connections (IEEE 802.3, 802.3u, 802.3ab)
- Supports a SerDes interface for 1000BASE-SX/LX fiber connections as well as an SGMII interface for SFP and external PHY connections