COMPANY CONFIDENTIAL • 1
Data Sheet
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August 2011
Version 1.1
AR8031 Integrated 10/100/1000 Mbps Ethernet
Transceiver
General Description
The AR8031 is part of the Arctic family of
devices — which includes the AR8031, AR8033,
and AR8035. The AR8031 is Atheros’ 4
th
generation, single port, 10/100/1000 Mbps, Tri-
speed Ethernet PHY. It supports both RGMII
and SGMII interfaces to the MAC.
The AR8031 provides a low power, low BOM
(Bill of Materials) cost solution for
comprehensive applications including
enterprise, carrier and home networks such as
CPE, home gateway, enterprise switch, carrier
switch/router, mobile base station and base
station controller, optical module and media
converter, industry automation and
measurement.
The AR8031 integrates Atheros Green ETHOS
®
power saving technologies and significantly
saves power not only during the work time,
but also overtime. Atheros Green ETHOS
®
power savings include ultra-low power in
cable unplugged mode or port power down
mode, and automatic optimized power saving
based on cable length. The AR8031 also
supports IEEE 802.3az EEE standard (Energy
Efficient Ethernet) and Atheros proprietary
SmartEEE. SmartEEE allows legacy MAC/SoC
devices without 802.3az support to function as
a complete 802.3az system. Further, the AR8031
supports Wake-on-LAN (WoL) feature to be
able to help manage and regulate total system
power requirements.
The AR8031 embeds CDT (Cable Diagnostics
Test) technology on-chip which allows
customers to measure cable length, detect the
cable status, and identify remote and local PHY
malfunctions, bad or marginal patch cord
segments or connectors. Some of the possible
problems that can be detected include opens,
shorts, cable impedance mismatch, bad
connectors, termination mismatch, and a bad
transformer.
The AR8031 requires only a single, 3.3V power
supply. On-chip regulators provide all the
other required voltages. It integrates the
termination R/C circuitry on both the MAC
interfaces (RGMII/SGMII) and the serial
resistors for the line side.
The AR8031 device also incorporates a 1.25
GHz SerDes. This interface can be connected
directly to a fiber-optic transceiver for 1000
BASE-X /100 BASE-FX mode or to MAC
device for SGMII interface.
The AR8031 supports both 1588v2 and
synchronous Ethernet to offer a complete time
synchronization solution to meet the next
generation network requirements. The key new
features supported by the device are:
n Clock synchronization between slave and
grandmaster by the exchange of PTP
packets. Supports IEEE 1588v2 by offering a
1588 paket parser, accurate time-stamping
and insertion to support both one-step and
two-step clock modes
n Supports both IEEE 1588v2 and
Synchronous Ethernet by offering recovered
clock output from data on the network-line
side.
The AR8031 supports IEEE 802.3az Energy
Efficient Ethernet (EEE) standard. The key
features supported by the device are:
n 10 BASE-Te PHY uses reduced transmit
amplitude.
n 100 BASE-TX and 1000 BASE-T use Low
Power Idle (LPI) mode to turn off unused
analog and digital blocks to save power
while data traffic is idle.
Features
n 10/100/1000 BASE-T IEEE 802.3 compliant
n Supports 1000 BASE-T PCS and auto-
negotiation with next page support
n Supports RGMII and/or SGMII interfaces
to MAC devices
n Supports Fiber and Copper combo mode
when MAC interface works in RGMII mode
n Supports additional IEEE 1000 BASE-X and
100 BASE-FX with Integrated SerDes
n RGMII timing modes support internal delay
and external delay on Rx path