Patent ID: 8130124

Claim:
A method for minimizing the occurrences of pathological sequences in a serial bit stream, comprising: receiving data words having a first bit length; analyzing the received data words for occurrences of a pathological sequence, a pathological sequence being a predetermined number of consecutive identical bits; if a pathological sequence is detected to occur in a data word, reformatting the respective data word to eliminate the pathological sequence by: segmenting the respective data word containing the pathological sequence into data segments having bit lengths less than a length of a pathological sequence; adding framing bits to the segments in the data words to form the reformatted data words having states different than a path sequence; and transmitting the reformatted data words in place of the data word containing the pathological sequence, wherein the reformatted data word includes a bit to indicate that the data word has been reformatted to eliminate a pathological sequence.