PHY
PHY is a generic
electronics term referring to a special electronic
integrated circuit or functional block of a circuit that takes care of encoding and decoding between a pure
digital domain (on-off) and a modulation in the
analog domain.
PHY is also a common abbreviation for
physical layer of
OSI model. (It can be pronounced "fī.")
* A PHY chip (called
PHYceiver) is commonly found on
Ethernet devices. Its purpose is digital access of the modulated link. Usually used together with an
MII-chip.
* A PHY part is integrated into most
Universal Serial Bus (USB) controllers in hosts or
embedded systems and provides the bridge between the digital and modulated parts of the interface.
* The
Infrared Data Associations IrDA specification includes an IrPHY specification for the physical layer of the data transport.
