Patent ID: 8472482

Claim:
A method, comprising receiving an Infiniband signal stream with no quiescent periods on a second Infiniband port of a switch, the received Infiniband signal stream having a second data rate; de-serializing the received Infiniband signal stream to generate a parallel data stream, the de-serialized parallel data stream composed of alternating Infiniband 8B/10B symbols or added control symbols; time-division de-multiplexing the parallel data stream to recover a plurality of de- multiplexed Infiniband signal streams; detecting a predefined percentage of control symbols in the plurality of de-multiplexed Infiniband signal streams; in response to the detecting, determining a data rate of each of a plurality of Infiniband signal streams that have been encoded into the received Infiniband signal stream; selectively removing the control symbols from the plurality of de-multiplexed Infiniband signal streams; serializing the plurality of de-multiplexed Infiniband signal streams to produce a plurality of Infiniband signal streams; and transmitting the plurality of Infiniband signal streams from respective first Infiniband ports of the switch, the plurality of Infiniband signal streams having a first data rate that is lower than the second data rate.