Autonegotiation - Message and Unformatted Next Page

Message and Unformatted Next Page

The base page (the base link code word) is sufficient for devices to advertise which ones among the 10BASE-T, 100BASE-TX and 100BASE-T4 modes they support. For gigabit Ethernet, two other pages are required. These pages are sent if both devices have sent base pages with a next page bit set to one.

The additional pages are of two kinds: message pages and unformatted pages. These pages are still 16-bit words encoded as pulses in the same way as the base page. Their first eleven bits are data, while their second-to-last bit indicates whether the page is a message page or an unformatted page. The last bit of each page indicates the presence of an additional page.

The 1000BASE-T supported modes and master-slave data (which is used to decide which of the two devices acts as the master, and which one acts as the slave) are sent using a single message page, followed by a single unformatted page. The message page contains:

  • half duplex capability
  • whether the device is single port or multiport
  • whether master/slave is manually configured or not
  • whether the device is manually configured as master or slave

The unformatted page contains a 10-bit word, called a master-slave seed value.

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