Expandable integrated circuit multiport repeater controller with

Abstract

A 100BASE-T compliant integrated circuit multiport repeater provides one or more medium independent interfaces (MII's) and a plurality of physical interfaces. This facilitates connection of the repeater to one or more external medium access controller devices also implementing the MII standard. The multiport repeater device shares status, configuration and control management function of the MII among the plurality of physical ports. Therefore, only one MII physical address is needed for each multiport repeater, rather than for each physical transceiver in the system. The medium independent interfaces on the repeater chip share a number of pins and logic so that the total number of I/O pins required for a repeater chip according to the present invention with multiple medium independent interfaces is substantially reduced over a similar device which might have a plurality of independent medium independent interfaces. The user of the repeater is capable of configuring the chip to handle a variety of different kinds of physical communication medium on a port by port basis, using the MII management bus.