The Design Of MAC Layer Of PCI Express

PCI Express is a high performance, general purpose I/O interconnect defined for a wide variety of future computing and communication platforms. PCI Express is a revolutionary version of PCI. It reserves the good aspect of PCI. Key PCI attributes, such ass load-store architecture, and software interfaces, are maintained, whereas its parallel bus implementation is replaced by a highly scalable, fully serial interface. PCI Express takes advantage of recent advances in point-to-point interconnects, Switch-based technology, and packetized protocol to deliver new levels of performance and features. Power Management, Quality Of Service (QoS), Hot-Plug/Hot-Swap support, Data Integrity, and Error Handling are among some of the advanced features supported by PCI Express. Meanwhile big improvement is involved based on PCI. So it is called as 3rd generation I/O interconnection.PCI Express specifies the architecture in terms of three discrete logical layers: the Transaction Layer, the Data Link Layer, and the Physical Layer. Moreover the Physical Layer can be divided into two sub sections MAC and PCS.This dissertation focuses on the implementation of MAC Layer. MAC Layer locates at the bottom of three layers architecture. It contacts with PCS directly. Mass of communication with analogue circuit is necessary for MAC layer. So we need to look inside the details of PCI Express. Some mechanisms of MAC layer are specified to guarantee the correctness and stability of high data rate transmission. So the MAC layer contains some complex logic and special way of design is needed to organize all of them.The design contains some highlights such as pipeline decoding, share SM & DP, generate code dynamically, divide & conquer methodology. All of them are used to optimize the design of MAC layer.