I am trying to understand the Network Interface Controller, like what is happening inside . I know that with a transceiver it takes some parallel data
and translates into serial data. But how is happening all of these? Please if you can give me some easy-to-understand answers because I am a beginner.

 

So presumably you are talking about ethernet, do you mean what an ethernet PHY does at the physical layer, or the whole deal with MAC aka link layer included?

 

I am interested about the physical layer.....about the components that I can find inside it and how the traffic is flowing inside...like from the motherboard bus to the ethernet cable

 

Hello,

Would this Glossary be of any help?
http://www.wildpackets.com/resources/compendium/overview

Bertus

 

Hello,

Would this Glossary be of any help?
http://www.wildpackets.com/resources/compendium/overview

Bertus

I am looking for something like this https://www.google.ro/url?sa=i&rct=...cKLgM7kcS9AqoKrk6WFSsfCA&ust=1483979774124823 . Some images with the components....but in this image for example I don't understand the difference between tx fifo and rx fifo

 

So presumably you are talking about ethernet, do you mean what an ethernet PHY does at the physical layer, or the whole deal with MAC aka link layer included?

I am interested about the physical layer.....about the components that I can find inside it and how the traffic is flowing inside...like from the motherboard bus to the ethernet cable

 

I am interested about the physical layer.....about the components that I can find inside it and how the traffic is flowing inside...like from the motherboard bus to the ethernet cable

That is gonna be complicated, since a NIC card usually has both the media access layer and the physical layer done in hardware.

How deeply are you familiar with the ethernet?
Lets say that you want to send a packet of data. Some layer above us solves the TCP/IP affairs, like which IP is sending to whom and what data.
From this, you somehow construct the ethernet frame ( see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_frame) If I am not mistaken the MAC (media access controller) gets this packet and tries to send it, and for this to happen correctly it adds the preamble and and maybe a checksum and some stop bytes so that the packet has the format that is proper for the ethernet frame. Then it sends this data to the PHY, which converts a few bits at a time into a sequence of voltages which it outputs on the data pair of the ethernet cable.

hope this was not too confusing

 

Depends on the motherboard bus as well, this adds another layer to the whole thing.