Patent ID: 9143464
Filing Date: 2015-09-22
Classification: H04L

Abstract:
1. An apparatus residing in a fibre channel host device, the fibre channel host device communicatively coupled to another fibre channel host device over a twisted pair link, the apparatus comprising: a physical layer (PHY) circuit operable, in a slave mode of operation, to receive data transmitted over the twisted pair link from a master PHY circuit in the another fibre channel host device, the PHY circuit comprising: a pulse amplitude modulation (PAM) encoder/decoder operable to convert the data transmitted over the twisted pair link to PAM symbols; clock recovery logic operable to recover a derived clock from the received data, wherein the derived clock determines a transmission rate between the PHY circuit and the master PHY circuit for the data received from the master PHY circuit; and a first elastic buffer operable to store the data received from the master PHY circuit via the PAM encoder/decoder and a second elastic buffer operable to store data received from the fibre channel host device for outgoing transmission to the master PHY circuit over the twisted pair link via the PAM encoder/decoder, wherein the transmission rate between the PAM encoder/decoder and the first elastic buffer is the same as the transmission rate between the PAM encoder/decoder and the second elastic buffer, while the transmission rate for data being transmitted from the PHY circuit and the fibre channel host device is different than the transmission rate being transmitted from the fibre channel host device to the PHY circuit.