Ethernet

Necessary knowledge: [HW] Controller module, [AVR] USART, [LIB] Serial Interface, [LIB] Alphanumeric LCD

Ethernet is summarizing networking technologies for LANs. It was introduced first in 1980 and later standardized as IEEE 802.3 in 1985. When talking about Ethernet standards, those are tightly connected with the OSI physical layer. Ethernet provides service up to and including the data link layer. As transfer medium, Ethernet started with coaxial cables, with the 10BASE5 standard, later replaced by twisted pair and after that by fiber optic links. The possible transmission rate with Ethernet started with 10 megabits per second, up to currently 100 gigabits per second. Most computer networks are currently using 100 Mbit/s infrastructures, tending to 1GB/s. A system utilizing Ethernet dives a networking (data) stream into small pieces, called frames. Each frame needs to contain the sender (source) and receiver (destination) addresses and data for error checking.