System and method for sending and receiving an ethernet frame

A control panel for a fire alarm system, comprising:

• a microcontroller operable to send and receive data in a form of Ethernet frames, the microcontroller including a physical layer port and a serial peripheral interface;
• a FPGA (field programmable gate array), wherein the microcontroller is operable to receive variable size serial peripheral interface (SPI) signals including the data from the physical layer port and send variable size SPI signals to the FPGA via the serial peripheral interface which includes a master port and a slave port;
• wherein the FPGA has a Differential Manchester encoder configured to encode data received from the master port of the serial peripheral interface and a Differential Manchester decoder;
• a transceiver that receives encoded data from the FPGA, and wherein the Differential Manchester decoder is operable to:
• receive Differential-Manchester-encoded signals via the transceiver;
• decode encoded signals;
• and
• transmit decoded signals to the slave port;
• a wire connected to the control panel for carrying the data and wherein the transceiver is configured to enable communication over the wire;
• and
• wherein the microcontroller and FPGA are operable to send and receive data at a rate of 1 Mbps over the wire in each direction for a rate of 2 Mbps total as a shared data path.