APPLICATION NOTE
PMC-980894 ISSUE 1 EXACT BUS CLOCKING APPLICATION NOTE
PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL TO PMC-SIERRA, INC. AND FOR ITS CUSTOMERS’ INTERNAL USE 4
2. INTRODUCTION
The PMC EXACT advanced switching chipset is based on the EXACT bus, which
provide the high speed switching interconnect between the EXACT switching devices
in building scalable and flexible switches.
The devices in this generation are the PM3370 (and the PM3371), which is an 8 port
10/100 Ethernet switch port controller; the PM3380, which is a single por t Gigabit
Ethernet port controller; the PM3390, which is the switch matrix capable of handling
8 EXACT ports to provide a bandwidth of 8 Gbps non-blocking; and the PM3391
which is a 6-EXACT port matrix device. Typical port counts at a system level are
0/8/1, 0/16/2, 0/32/4 etc.
The EXACT bus stands for Ethernet Switching Access Control and Termination. The
EXACT bus has a raw bandwidth of 1.25 Gbps in the transmit direction and 1.25
Gbps in the receive direction. Please refer to the PMC-970215 EXACT Protocol
Specification for a detail technical description of the EXACT bus operation.
The purpose of this document is to provide a detailed description of the EXACT bus
cloc ki ng confi g urati on fo r the PM 33 70, PM 3371 , PM 338 0, PM 339 0 and PM33 91
Ethernet switch port devices.
Note:
The timing for the PM3371 is identical to the PM3370. Similarly the timing fo r
the PM3391 is identical to the PM3390. Therefore the description for the PM3370
applies to the PM3371, and the description of the PM3390 applies to the PM3391
throughout this document.
2.1 EXACT Clock Modes
The EXACT bus supports two modes of operation: the SERDES mode and the Clear
Channel mode. The following sections explain the these clocking modes and the
way they are used to support system clocking design.
1. SERDES – Serializer/de-serializer mode. Typically this mode is used to support
stacking between modules to facilitate the transfer of clock and data over mo derately
electrical distance. Data is encoded in 8B10B linecode and transmitted to the
SERDES on every rising edge of a 125MHz transmit clock. Data is received from
the SERDES rising edges of complementary receive clocks. The EXACT bus
defaults to SERDES mode.