4.21 Link Status Overview - Rev D0

Link status is an indicator that the network media is active and other stations are connected to the physical media and available for communication. Traditionally, a positive link status is set once a pair of stations at each end of a full duplex point-to-point link segment have trained their equalizers and established two-way communication. When this occurs, the Link Status (LNKSTS) bit of the Basic Status register is set.

For a half-duplex mixing segment, however, there is no equivalent concept of link status specified. Stations connected to a multidrop media make no announcement of their presence and there is no automatic way to detect them. This limitation may introduce challenges when using existing full duplex Ethernet driver architectures with 10BASE-T1S should they require knowledge of media availability. The device therefore includes features to create a surrogate link status indication. Several options are available and presented here.