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I'm a new member to this community.

I've just started to learn and practice on working with LAN Ethernet PHYs, Switches and other ICs related to Ethernet.

However, I've a few questions where I couldn't understand some terms.

Can someone please explain me on what the terms mean:

"Managed Ethernet Switch" - What is being managed?

"Switch Fabric"

"Virtual PHY"

"Peer to Peer transparent clocks"

I was going through the datasheet of this - IC

Please do help. Thank you.

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  • A managed Ethernet switch provides some kinds of management and configuration - e.g. bandwidth measurement, error counters, SNMP, VLAN and port configuration. See [1] for more.
  • A switch fabric is a concept for building hardware switches - it alludes to the basic property that each port can talk to any other (idle) port at the same time. You can visualize that as a fabric of connections inside the switch (although it's not usually implemented like that).
  • The virtual PHY is described in the text (an actually PHY-less connection to the host, using an MII).
  • Transparent clocks refers to PTP/IEEE 1588 synchronized clocks.
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  • Could you please provide some more explanation on the 3 point of Virtual PHY? What is the advantage?
    – Newbie
    Commented May 16, 2022 at 14:01
  • A direct MII-to-MII connection skips the two PHYs in between for backplane-type connections. It's just a bit less hardware for the same functionality.
    – Zac67 ♦
    Commented May 16, 2022 at 14:08

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