Patent ID: 7779163

Claim:
A device for communicating over a communication medium, the device comprising: a medium attachment unit (MAU) for receiving and transmitting messages on the communication medium; a central processing unit (CPU) for processing data contained in messages received and creating data to be contained in messages to be transmitted; and a communication controller for interfacing between the MAU and the CPU, the communication controller for processing events received from or transmitted to the communication medium and including an order of occurrence identification (OOO_ID) counter and an event queue memory, the event queue memory for sequentially storing an event type identifier for each event, the OOO_ID counter is incremented when an event is received from or transmitted to the communication medium and provides an OOO_ID count value associated with each event type identifier, the communication controller further including a plurality of order of occurrence (OOO) timers and a plurality of timer OOO_ID registers, each timer OOO_ID register associated with one of the plurality of OOO timers, wherein when an OOO timer expires, a current OOO_ID count value from the OOO_ID counter is stored in its associated timer OOO_ID register.