Patent ID: 7729389

Claim:
A network interface, comprising: N input lanes configured to receive data symbols and idle symbols; a substitutor module configured to replace, at periodic intervals, idle symbols on all of the N input lanes with alignment symbols to form an alignment group; an interleaver module configured to interleave the data symbols and the alignment group onto M transmit lanes according to an interleaving pattern, wherein the interleaving pattern provides one of the M transmit lanes with the alignment group, where M is an integer greater than 1 and N is an integer greater than M; and M encoder modules corresponding to the M transmit lanes, respectively, wherein each one of the M encoders is configured to encode groups of symbols from the corresponding one of the M transmit lanes using 64/66 encoding according to 10GBase-R, and transmit the encoded groups of symbols according to 10GBase-R.