PHY (chip)

PHY (chip)

PHY is an abbreviation for the physical layer of the OSI model.

An instantiation of PHY connects a link layer device (often called a MAC) to a physical medium such as an optical fiber or copper cable. A PHY device typically includes a Physical Coding Sublayer (PCS) and a Physical Medium Dependent (PMD) layer. The PCS encodes and decodes the data that is transmitted and received. The purpose of the encoding is to make it easier for the receiver to recover the signal.