Taking a quick look at the diagram shown here on the right, differentiating features in the Ethernet MAC and PHY. The Ethernet Controller is a monolithic implementation which consists of an industry leading, third-party MAC IP which has been coupled with TI’s latest generation PHY technology. The Ethernet Controller also features a fully integrated PHY with MMI bus. A dedicated DMA controller, which has bus mastery, enables the CPU offloading of the basic Ethernet functions. Finally, the MAC has a dedicated IEEE1588 HW block for high precision timing protocols ideal for industrial Ethernet applications.