Recently, the communication speed for local area networks
has been greatly increased (e.g., FDDI, Fast Ethernet, ATM
can run at a rate higher than 100Mbps).
With the increasing acceptance of the ATM technology, there
requires a significant development effort in building all the
related ATM components, subsystems, and systems. There are
several ATM host interfaces and chipsets being manufactured.
Designing of the
above subsystems and associated components has focused more
on providing the basic transport capability for use in
experimenting the ATM technology. Although there are several
commercial ATM products available, experience in using
such a technology is still in the early stage.
In this homepage, we show our design of the high speed
ATM/TAXI network interface cards. Our motivation for building such
a prototype NIC subsystem is to conduct further research on
multimedia applications and their associated control mechanisms .
In these cards, we have designed two
ASICs that implementing the ATM/AAL functions. We have also
designed hardware blocks for handling the TAXI interface
between ATM chipsets and TAXI chipsets (ATM physical interface layer).
More details are in the following.
This ATM NIC project started in Summer 1994, following
several prior years' efforts in the ATM-related IC design.
Through the efforts of the hardware team of the Communications &
Networking (C&N) group in the EE department, National Chung Cheng
University, two versions of the ATM network interface cards have
been built. Now, the team members are improving version 2 card to
Version 2.1. And at the same time, version 3 card is near
completion.......
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