Problem with PHY clocks on Spartan 3E Starter Kit

Hi,

I am designing a ethernet block using the Spartan 3E Starter Kit. The
design will be using the RX and TX clock provided by the SMSC PHY on
FPGA pins T7 and V3 on the Spartan 3E Starter Kit. I have problems
getting the design to work and when I started to look for errors I
found that the RX clock from the PHY doesn't seem to be possible to
use as a clock.

I made a simple counter which flashes a led in 2 Hz using first the TX
clock from the PHY as the clock input and then the RX clock as the
clock input. When I'm using the TX clock everything works fine and
when I'm using the RX clock I get no activity at all. I have verified
that I have  a clock output from the PHY using an oscilloscope.

If I instead run the counter on the 50MHz clock and sample the RX or
TX clock and increment the counter when an change on the RX or TX
clock signal has occured it works fine using any of the input clocks
from the PHY.

One could suspect some problems with the input buffers in the FPGA but
since it works using the TX clock I cant see that it is a problem in
the FPGA. It is a very confusing problem, can you give me some help
what I am doing wrong?

"roger" <roger.jons@gmail.com> writes:
> I made a simple counter which flashes a led in 2 Hz using first the TX
> clock from the PHY as the clock input and then the RX clock as the
> clock input. When I'm using the TX clock everything works fine and
> when I'm using the RX clock I get no activity at all. I have verified
> that I have  a clock output from the PHY using an oscilloscope.

Doesn't the RX clock only appear while a frame is being received?
That was how many of the lower-speed PHY interfaces worked, but I'm not
sure about MII.