
MT9072
Advance Information
72
8.1.5
When the HDLC transmitter is not sending packets it will wait in one of two states
Interframe Time Fill state: This is a continuous series of flags occurring between frames indicating that
the channel is active but that no data is being sent.
Idle state: An idle Channel occurs when at least 15 contiguous 1s are transmitted or received.
In both states the transmitter will exit the wait state when data is loaded into the transmitter FIFO.
Interframe Time Fill and Link Channel States
8.1.6
A go ahead is defined as the pattern "011111110" (contiguous 7Fs) and is the occurrence of a frame abort
sequence followed by a zero, outside of the boundaries of a normal packet. Being able to distinguish a proper
(in packet) frame abort sequence from one occurring outside of a packet allows a higher level of signaling
protocol which is not part of the HDLC specifications.
Go-Ahead
8.1.7
The HDLC transceiver can be reset by either the power reset input signal or by the HRST Control bit in the
HDLC Test control register (YF3). When reset, the HDLC Control Registers are cleared, resulting in the
transmitter and receiver being disabled. The Receiver and Transmitter can be enabled independent of one
another through HDLC control(YF2 bits RXEN and TXEN). The transceiver input and output are enabled when
the enable control bits in HDLC control are set. Transmit to receive loopback as well as a receive to transmit
loopback are also supported. Transmit and receive bit rates and enables can operate independently.
Functional Description
Received packets from the serial interface, are sectioned into bytes by an HDLC receiver that detects flags,
checks for go-ahead signals, removes inserted zeros, performs a cyclical redundancy check (CRC) on
incoming data, and monitors the address if required. Packet reception begins upon detection of an opening
flag. The resulting bytes are concatenated with two status bits (RQ9, RQ8 in HDLC status register Y1D) and
placed in a receiver first-in-first-out (Rx FIFO); a buffer register that generates status and interrupts for
microprocessor read control.
In conjunction with the control circuitry, the microprocessor writes data bytes into a Tx buffer register (Tx FIFO)
that generates status and interrupts. Packet transmission begins when the microprocessor writes a byte to the
Tx FIFO. Two status bits are added to the Tx FIFO for transmitter control of frame aborts (FA) and end of
packet (EOP) flags. Packets have flags appended, zeros inserted, and a CRC, also referred to as frame
checking sequence (FCS), added automatically during serial transmission. When the Tx FIFO is empty and
finished sending a packet, Interframe Time Fill bytes (continuous flags (7E hex)), or Mark Idle (continuous
ones) are transmitted to indicate that the channel is idle.
8.1.8
Following initialization and enabling, the transmitter is in the Idle Channel state (Mark Idle), continuously
sending ones. Interframe Time Fill state (Flag Idle) is selected by setting the MI bit in register YF2 high. The
Transmitter remains in either of these two states until data is written to the Tx FIFO. YF2 bits EOP (end of
packet) and FA (Frame Abort) are set as status bits before the microprocessor loads 8 bits of data into the 10
bit wide FIFO (8 bits data and 2 bits status). To change the tag bits being loaded in the FIFO, HDLC Master
Control must be written to before writing to the FIFO. However, EOP and FA are reset after writing to the TX
FIFO. The Transmit Byte Count Register(YF6) may also be used to tag an end of packet. The register is loaded
with the number of bytes in the packet and decrements after every write to the Tx FIFO. When a count of one is
reached, the next byte written to the FIFO is tagged as an end of packet. The register may be made to cycle
through the same count if the packets are of the same length by setting HDLC Master Control bit Cycle.
HDLC Transmitter
If the transmitter is in the Idle Channel state when data is written to the Tx FIFO, then an opening flag is sent
and data from Tx FIFO follows. Otherwise, data bytes are transmitted as soon as the current flag byte has been
sent. Tx FIFO data bytes are continuously transmitted until either the FIFO is empty or an EOP or FA status bit
is read by the transmitter. After the last bit of the EOP byte has been transmitted, a 16-bit FCS is sent followed
by a closing flag. When multiple packets of data are loaded into Tx FIFO, only one flag is sent between
packets. When the HDLC is connected to FDL or a transmit channel