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Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor
9 years agoNo, I mean Media Access Control which receives data from your logic and drives the Ethernet Phy chip & vice versa.
There are IP cores available in the Quartus, which require Nios to operate. There are also third party IP cores that you can acquire, even free IP cores. You can design your own MAC core. Study the PHY chip data sheet. Depending on your PHY and PCB, you may implement one of MII, GMII, RGMII & SGMII protocols. It depends on your PHY chip on the Ethernet board and the PCB (A PHY may support several protocols, but the PCB designer chooses one of them).