General Description - LSI LSIFC929 Technical Manual

1.2 General Description

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The LSI Logic LSIFC929 Dual Channel Fibre Channel I/O Processor is
a high-performance, Intelligent I/O Processor (IOP) designed to
simultaneously support mass storage and IP protocols on a full duplex
2 GBaud FC Link. The sophisticated design and local memory
architecture work together to reduce the host CPU and PCI bandwidth
required to support FC I/O operations.
From the host CPU perspective, the LSIFC929 manages the FC Link at
the exchange level for mass storage (FCP) protocols. The LSIFC929
supports multiple I/O requests per host interrupt in most applications.
From the FC Link perspective, the LSIFC929 is a highly efficient NL_Port
supporting point-to-point, and public and private loop topologies, as well
as the FC switch/attach topology defined under the ANSI X3T11 FC-PH
standard. The LSIFC929 contains sufficient hardware support to perform
Class 3 service. The LSIFC929 is uniquely designed to support FC
environments where independent, full duplex transmission is required for
maximum FC Link efficiency. Special attention has been given to the
design to accelerate context switching and Link utilization.
The LSIFC929 includes a 64-bit, 66 MHz PCI interface to the host
environment. The host interface is designed to minimize the amount of
time spent on the PCI bus for nondata moving activities such as
initialization, command and error recovery. In addition, the host interface
has inherent flexibility to support the OEM's implementation trade-offs
between CPU, PCI, and I/O bandwidth.
The high level of integration in the LSIFC929 Controller enables low cost
FC implementations.
incorporating the LSIFC929 Controller.
Introduction
Copyright © 2000, 2001 by LSI Logic Corporation. All rights reserved.
Figure 1.1 shows a typical board configuration