Companies such as Wiznet with their W5100 device have taken the logical step of integrating the MAC, PHY and the entire TCP stack into one IC. If you don’t happen to have one of those then all is not lost. There’s an STM32F107 modestly hiding behind the faded print Ethernet tends to feature in special series MCUs or newer and more expensive devices. ![]() The STM32F107 is one, the STM32F2 and STM32F4 series are others. ![]() Only a minority of MCUs have ethernet support. This separation of concerns reduces overall cost by limiting the complexity of the components outside the MCU. It also does the reverse, decoding incoming signals from the RJ45 connector and talking MII back to the MCU. The PHY receives the 4-bit wide MII protocol and synthesises the differential signals necessary to drive the ethernet RJ45 socket. ![]() The MCU provides a 10/100Mbs MAC and can talk the standard Media Independent Interface (MII) protocol to the outside world. MCUs such as the STM32F107 come with a degree of ethernet support built-in. Well, it’s the physical transceiver that converts a well-known data-bus protocol implemented by your MCU into the physical signals that go down the wire. A what? If you’ve never crossed paths with ethernet technologies before then you may not know what an ethernet PHY is.
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