FC106

Revision 1.2

4/32

September 98

1

General Description

The FC106 Fibre Channel transceiver chip implements the lower layer protocols of the ANSI

X3.230-1994 Fibre Channel standard. The Fibre Channel standard specifies the mapping of

various upper layer protocols (ULP) such as SCSI, IP and HiPPI to a common lower layer

protocol, together with appropriate electrical and optical high performance specifications.

Fibre Channel provides a channel over which concurrent communication of a variety of

ULP’s may exist on a single interconnect between workstations, mainframes and

supercomputers, and provides a connection to mass storage devices and other peripherals.

The FC106 implements the Fibre Channel electrical transceiver physical layer specification

for 1.0625 Gbit/s. At this frequency, the Fibre Channel delivers 100 MByte/s of data

bandwidth over a twin coaxial or twin optical fibre cable. This bandwidth equals or exceeds

most bus bandwidths. The FC106 chip performs the high speed serialization and

deserialization function that makes bus-bandwidth, serial communication possible. This chip

can drive electrical cables directly or it can interface with suitable optical modules. Figure 1.1

shows the different connections.

Figure 1.1

FC106 chip connections

The parallel interface on the FC106 is compatible with the 10-Bit Interface Specification

(ANSI TR/X3.18-1998) which defines a common, standard signaling interface between the

Fibre Channel Physical and Protocol layers. In addition, the FC106 can be used for all other

proprietary serial links transmitting data as 10-bit encoded characters.

The FC106 incorporates an impedance adaptor circuit (set by the pins ZC+, ZC-) to ensure

high quality adaptation to the transmission line characteristic impedance.This feature is

optional and the user can keep external adaptation for compatibility reasons.

FC106

REFCLK (1)

FC106

REFCLK (2)

Fibre

Channel

Controll er

Fibre

Channel

Controller

System 1

System 2

1.0625 Gb/s

Serial Data over copper

or optical cables