The RTL8305SB is a Fast Ethernet switch, which integrates memory, five MACs, and five physical layer transceivers for
10Base-T and 100Base-TX operation into a single chip. All ports support 100Base-FX, which share pins (TX+-/RX+-) with UTP ports and need no SD+/- pins, a development using Realtek proprietary technology. Due to the lack of auto-negotiation in 100Base-FX applications, the RTL8305SB can be forced into half or full duplex mode and can enable or disable flow control in fiber mode.
The five ports are separated into 3 groups (GroupX/GroupY/Port4) for flexible port configuration using strapping pins upon reset. The SetGroup pin is used to select port members in GroupX and GroupY. While the port members is determined, you can use mode selection pin (GxMode/Gymode/P4Mode[1:0]) to select operating interfaces such as 10/100Base-TX, 100Base-FX. Each group has 4 pins to select initial port status (ANEG/Force, 100/10, Full/Half, Enable/Disable Flow Control) upon reset. Upon reset, in addition to using strapping pins, the RTL8305SB also can be configured with an EEPROM or read/write operation by a CPU through the MDC/MDIO interface.
The fifth port (port 4) supports an external MAC interface, which can be set to PHY mode MII, PHY mode SNI, or MAC
mode MII to work with a routing engine, HomePNA or VDSL transceiver. In order to accomplish diagnostics in complex
network systems, the RTL8305SB also provides a loopback feature in each port for a variable CPU system.
The RTL8305SB contains a 1K entry address look-up table and supports a 16 entry CAM to avoid hash collisions and to maintain forwarding performance. The RTL8305SB supports IEEE 802.3x full duplex flow control and back- pressure half duplex flow control. The broadcast storm filtering function is provided to filter unusual broadcast storm issues and has an intelligent switch engine to prevent Head-Of -Line blocking problems.
The RTL8305SB supports 5 group