Patent ID: 7672300

Claim:
A network device, comprising: a multi-port MAC device that includes N MAC devices and that outputs a port multiplexed and encoded parallel data stream; and a first serializer/deserializer (SERDES) that serializes said port multiplexed and encoded parallel data stream from said multi-port MAC device to generate a serialized data stream and that transmits said serialized data stream to a second SERDES of said network device, wherein said multi-port MAC device comprises N speed translators that receive parallel data streams from respective ones of said N MAC devices and that selectively output speed translated data streams, where N is an integer greater than 1, wherein one of said N speed translators comprises a non-duplicating appender that appends bits to one of said parallel data streams, wherein said non-duplicating appender appends W bits to a first one of said parallel data streams, and wherein said N speed translators comprise: another appender that appends X bits to a second one of said parallel data streams; a first duplicator that duplicates output of said non-duplicating appender Y times to generate a first one of said speed translated data streams; and a second duplicator that duplicates output of said another appender Z times to generate a second one of said speed translated data streams, where W, X, Y and Z are integers that are each greater than 1 and where Y is less than Z.