Why Are There 3 CPUs in a Neuron?

• The Neuron chip is a complete LonWorks system on a chip, and contains three CPU’s.
• One is the Media Access Processor (MAC), and is responsible for the sending and receiving of messages on the network.
• The Network Processor is responsible for the middle layers of the protocol. Doing things like packet routing, destination addressing, end-to-end acknowledgements, retries, duplicate message detection, etc.
• The third processor is the Application processor, which runs the users custom application.
• Having separate processors allows the application to still send and receive messages even if the network processor gets very busy.

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