Inventors:
Joseph A. Curcio - Roseville CA, US
Mark A. Gravel - Roseville CA, US
Daniel J. Dove - Colfax CA, US
International Classification:
H04J 3/00
Abstract:
A plurality of media access controllers (MACs) are time division multiplexed with one or more serializer/deserializer (SerDes) devices, wherein there are more MACs than SerDes devices and/or a single multi-rate Ethernet MAC is able to communicate with a multi-rate PHY spanning speeds from 10 megabits per second to 10 gigabits per second using the same framing mechanism and structure.