AM263P4: Two port Ethernet Custom Design Architecture

Hi Tollman,

Thanks for reaching out over E2E.

TollMan said:

Which (CPSW vs ICSS) subsystem should be used? 

TollMan said:

No industrial Ethernet

• ICSS is designed for industrial communication and to be used with some industrial protocols such as EtherCAT EtherNET/IP etc. The main advantages of ICSS are that we can offload the host processor (ARM) of real-time processing requirements and can implement various protocols using ICSS as PRU's are programmable.
• It has the support for the same LwIP stack/ features that we support over CPSW.
• ICSS comes with PRU (Programmable Real-time cores).
• Since you do not have a requirement for Industrial Ethernet, we can work with CPSW. You can read more about CPSW here: dev.ti.com/.../node

TollMan said:

  DP83826 PHY

You can follow the porting guide: https://e2e.ti.com/support/microcontrollers/arm-based-microcontrollers-group/arm-based-microcontrollers/f/arm-based-microcontrollers-forum/1353799/faq-am2634-integration-of-phy-driver-on-custom-board

From what I remember we were able to read the basic BMSR and BMCR registers successfully in case of your 3-port system using the above guide.

TollMan said:

LwIP on both ports.

Both ICSS and CPSW can support this. You would have a common LwIP interface on R5F catering to both Port-1 and Port-2. You can configure the CPSW switch in Dual-MAC mode or Switch mode, having both ports enabled. This way, all the packets would reach the R5F core running the LwIP stack and can be routed accordingly by LwIP.

The choice between CPSW vs ICSS depends on the end application and the bandwidth and throughput requirement.

Can you share your end-use case application details/KPIs?

Best regards,
Shaunak

Hi Shaunak,

I can't share the application details of the design here. 

For this application the bandwidth required is low. Typically, less than 1kbps, but occasionally this may spike to ~10kbps. This traffic will be similar for both ports.

Which two MACs would you recommend?

Regards,

Tollman

Hi Shaunak,

Thanks for the input. CPSW in Dual MAC mode looks like the best solution.

What I meant by:

  "Which two MACs would you recommend?"

... was, assuming CPSW in Dual MAC mode, is there implications for which two MACs to use.

In SysConfig, I do not see that the MII MAC is available for CPSW. 

Should I be using RMII1 and RMII2?

Thanks,

Tollman

Hi Tollman,

This seems to be a bug in the AM263Px syscfg. I will get back with an update on this.

Also, just for my information, do you use the MCU_PLUS_SDK installer from ti.com or do you get your codebase from our GitHub (github.com/.../mcupsdk-core)

Regards,
Shaunak

Hi Shaunak,

It seems like can work with any MCA CPSW, but this may require a work-around until SysConfig is fixes.

Is this a good characterization?

I need to advise the hardware team on what to do with the schematic,

Is this a good reason to use the two RMII ports?

Is there any reason to use MII, assuming low-bandwidth requirements?

Regards,

Tollman