Nu Horizons – New Ethernet controller minimises packet loss

Availability of the SMSC LAN9218i has been announced by Nu Horizons Electronics. The single-chip 10/100 Ethernet controller is designed for high-performance embedded applications.

Packet loss is reduced or eliminated through the use of 16KByte of internal SRAM that can hold over 200 received packets. If the receive FIFO gets too full, the device automatically generates flow control packets to the remote node, or asserts back-pressure on the remote node by generating network collisions.

The controller integrates Ethernet MAC and PHY with a high-performance SRAM-like slave interface. The simple but functional host bus interface provides a glue-less connection to most common 16 and 32-bit microprocessors and microcontrollers. It includes large transmit and receive FIFOs with a high speed host bus interface to accommodate high bandwidth, high latency applications. In addition, the device’s memory buffer architecture allows the most efficient use of memory resources by optimising packet granularity, says the company.