The DP83955 56 LitE Repeater Interface Controller (LERIC) may be used to implement an IEEE 802 3 multiport repeater unit It fully satisfies the IEEE 802 3 repeater specification including the functions defined by the repeater segment partition and jabber lockup protection state machines The LERIC has an on-chip phase-locked-loop (PLL) for Manchester data decoding a Manchester encoder and an Elasticity Buffer for preamble regeneration Each LERIC can connect up to 7 cable segments via its network interface ports One port is fully Attachment Unit Interface (AUI) compatible and is able to connect to an external Medium Attachment Unit (MAU) using the maximum length of AUI cable The other 6 ports have integrated 10BASE-T transceivers These transceiver functions may be bypassed so that the LERIC may be used with external transceivers such as National's DP8392 coaxial transceiver In addition large repeater units may be constructed by cascading LERICs together over the Inter-LERICTM or InterRICTM bus The LERIC is configurable for specific applications It provides port status information for LED array displays Additionally the LERIC has a mP interface to provide individual port status configuration and port enable disable functions The DP83956 has all the features of the DP83955 except that two of the bidirectional signals on DP83955 are changed to unidirectional signals on DP83956 and one more signal is added to DP83956 to accommodate the addition of bus transceivers for cascading a greater number of LERICs in large repeater applications