Ethernet Basics - Switch Fabric, Managed Ethernet Switch & Virtual PHY terminology

Question

I'm a new member to this community.

I've just started to learn and practice on working with LAN Ethernet PHYs, Switches and other ICs related to Ethernet.

However, I've a few questions where I couldn't understand some terms.

Can someone please explain me on what the terms mean:

"Managed Ethernet Switch" - What is being managed?

"Switch Fabric"

"Virtual PHY"

"Peer to Peer transparent clocks"

I was going through the datasheet of this - IC

Please do help. Thank you.

Answer 1

• A managed Ethernet switch provides some kinds of management and configuration - e.g. bandwidth measurement, error counters, SNMP, VLAN and port configuration. See [1] for more.
• A switch fabric is a concept for building hardware switches - it alludes to the basic property that each port can talk to any other (idle) port at the same time. You can visualize that as a fabric of connections inside the switch (although it's not usually implemented like that).
• The virtual PHY is described in the text (an actually PHY-less connection to the host, using an MII).
• Transparent clocks refers to PTP/IEEE 1588 synchronized clocks.