Apparatus and method for packetizing and segmenting MPEG packets

A network interface circuit for enabling a host system including host memory to communicate with a remote system, the network interface circuit comprising:

• a system bus interface coupled to the host system in order to access a block of data stored in the host memory;
• a transmit buffer memory coupled to the system bus interface;
• a system and ATM layer core configured to convert the block of data into a plurality of cell packets suitable for transmission to the remote system, the system and ATM layer core including
• a transmit DMA engine coupled to said transmit buffer memory, said transmit DMA engine being configured to access a plurality of overhead parameters from a data descriptor stored in the memory element, to packetize the block of data into a plurality of MPEG packets and to set at least one header tag bit for each word in the MPEG packet to indicate a location of the word in the plurality of MPEG frames, and
• a transmit segmentation engine coupled to said transmit buffer memory, said transmit segmentation engine being configured to segment the plurality of MPEG packets in order to produce the plurality of cell packets.

A method for optimizing efficiency in transferring a block of data in a memory element, the method comprising the steps of:

• accessing a plurality of overhead parameters from a data descriptor pointing to the block of data;
• packetizing the block of data into a plurality of packets;
• and
• segmenting the plurality of packets to produce a plurality of cell packets, each of the plurality of cell packets contains in common at least one of said plurality of overhead parameters;
• and
• loading a ring number identifying the data description into an entry of a transmit completion ring of the memory element upon completion of transmission of the plurality of cell packets.