.. _firmware-transport-interfaces:

Transport interfaces
====================

The IPbus firmware repository contains a number of 'transport interface' modules: these act as a master to the transactor (which is transport-medium agnostic), relaying lists of IPbus transaction from/to a IP core that implements the physical layer encoding/decoding (e.g. an Ethernet MAC core).

.. TODO - Mention: Physical module typically chip-specific, but transport interface chip-agnostic.

In particular, we provide:

* A :ref:`1Gigabit Ethernet/UDP interface <firmware-transport-udp>`, which contains protocol engines for UDP, ICMP and ARP.
* An AXI4 interface, which is used in PCIe-based designs.
* A ModelSim FLI-based UDP interface 

.. * A optional ‘out of band’ interface to allow control of the bus via a non-Ethernet route (e.g. via I2C or SPI from an external microcontroller)

.. toctree::
  :hidden:
   
  udp


.. * Interfaces for receiving and transmitting IPbus transaction lists over Gigabit Ethernet and PCIe
.. * The **transactor** - a transport-medium-agnostic component that decodes the transactions, and is the master of the on-chip bus