Patent ID: 6959015

Claim:
An apparatus comprising: a data alignment device including a plurality of input channels to receive a stream of input characters; a control code detector coupled to the plurality of input channels to detect the occurrence of an aligning character in each input channel; a plurality of buffers, each buffer coupled to one input channel to store the input characters received over that input channel; a plurality of output channels, each output channel coupled to one buffer and to a corresponding input channel to transmit a stream of characters from the corresponding buffer; and a control unit coupled to the control code detector and buffers, and configured to monitor the occurrence of an aligning character in each input channel, to hold the aligning character and subsequently received input characters for each input channel in the corresponding buffer until an aligning character has been detected on every input channel, then resume transmissions over all of the output channels starting with each aligning character on the corresponding buffers and then the subsequently received input characters in the order in which they were received, wherein the control unit to stop holding the aligning character and subsequently received input characters for each input channel in the corresponding buffer if an aligning character has not been detected on every input channel within a given period of time from the first detected aligning character.