Patent ID: 7752343

Claim:
A Fibre Channel (FC)/Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) port of a multi-protocol switch couplable to SATA devices over a SATA connection and to FC devices over an FC connection through the FC/SATA ports, and comprising: an FC/SATA Phy configured to initially operate at an FC speed, before a protocol associated with an attached device and an operating speed of the attached device are determined; an automatic device type detection and speed configuration circuit within the FC/SATA port, comprising a receive loss (rx_los) detector for detecting a presence or an absence of a receive signal from the attached device to the FC/SATA port and generating an rx_los signal in response to the presence or absence of the receive signal, a SATA/SAS Out Of Band (OOB) initialization sequence detector/generator coupled to the rx_los detector, wherein the SATA/SAS OOB initialization sequence detector/generator monitors the rx_los signal, and in response to detecting the rx_los signal changing states from asserted to de-asserted at regular, predictable intervals, monitors the receive signal for any known SATA OOB sequence, and upon detecting a known SATA OOB sequence, directs the multi-protocol switch to set the FC/SATA Phy within the FC/SATA Port to a SATA speed, and an FC auto-negotiation process detector/generator coupled to the rx_los detector, wherein the FC auto-negotiation process detector/generator, in response to detecting a de-asserted state of the rx_los signal, monitors the receive signal for FC ordered sets associated with the FC auto-negotiation process, participates in an FC auto-negotiation process with the attached device, detects whether the FC auto-negotiation process was successful, and notifies the multi-protocol switch that the attached device is an FC device and is ready for insertion if the FC auto-negotiation process was successful.