Patent ID: 7782929

Claim:
A method of receiving one of a plurality of Ethernet transmission protocol signals, each transmission protocol signal comprising a plurality of transmission signal streams, comprising: determining which of the transmission protocol signals is being received; connecting an analog front-end processor to one of a plurality of protocol digital processors based on the transmission protocol signal being received, the plurality of protocol digital processors comprising a highest speed digital processor and lower-frequency processors; selecting a setting of at least one functional parameter of at least one of the analog front-end processor and the protocol digital processors based on the transmission protocol signal being received; selecting processing rates of the protocol digital processors based on the transmission protocol signal being received, wherein the processing rate of the highest speed digital processor is selected to be a sampling rate of the analog front-end processor, and the processing rate of the lower-frequency processors is selected to be less than the sampling rate of the analog front-end processor; and ADC sampling of the plurality of transmission signal streams of the transmission protocol signal being received by the analog front-end processor based on a shared clock source, wherein for the lower-frequency processors, the ADC sampling comprises over-sampling the transmission signal streams of the transmission protocol signal being received, generating new samples from original samples, and digitally reconstructing a sampling phase of the over-sampled transmission signal streams.