The following figure illustrates a hypothetical powerline network consisting of two devices. Each device has an INT6300™ with optional dedicated flash memory and an onboard processor with associated storage. The processor in each device is the local host for that device and the remote host for the other device. The processor storage is unspecified but it must be persistent. The two devices are connected via coax or powerline. The flash memory is optional in this design because it uses the INT6300™ chipset.
The Boot Loader is permanent program that executes on startup. It detects the presence of flash memory and attempts to read SDRAM configuration from flash memory then load and runtime the firmware image and PIB from flash memory. On success, the Boot runtime firmware starts and the device assumes HomePlug AV compliant behavior. On failure, the Boot Loader requests SDRAM configuration, runtime firmware image and PIB from the local host. The local host must be prepared to respond to these requests.
On a system having no flash memory, the Boot Loader will request SDRAM configuration information from the local host. Once that is received, the Boot Loader will request a firmware image and PIB from the local host. The local host determines which firmware image and PIB to download, manages the download sequence and starts firmware execution.
Atheros software, such as the Windows Device Manager, Linux Flash Utility and Embedded API all support the Boot from Host configuration.
Once the firmware is running on the INT6300™ , a remote host can forward runtime firmware and PIB to the local host via the INT6300™ firmware. The remote host might reside on anotherINT6300™ device, as shown in the previous figure, or be located anywhere on the HomePlug® AV network. In either case, the operations described are the same.