SMI Interface Implementation on an 8-bit PIC®
Is it possible to implement MDC/MDIO (SMI) bus on PIC18F67J60? If not, please recommend another Microchip microcontroller.
Theoretically, it could be implemented with general purpose I/O pins, clock and data but it would be very complicated and time-consuming. For this reason, we do not recommend this rather mature PIC18F67J60 for this purpose. Instead, you could use the PIC18F67J60 stand-alone (it has MAC and PHY on-chip), just connect magnetics to it. In general, for TCP/IP Ethernet applications, we recommend you use more powerful controllers with more RAM and ROM. Please have a look at our 32-bit family, for instance, the PIC32MX6xxx family. It has on-chip MAC and uses the industry standard interfaces, namely MII or RMII to connect to PHY/Switch. In addition, the management interface, MDIO, is fully implemented.