Patent ID: 6914901

Claim:
A method for communicating data, comprising: communicating a first set of data from a first channel to a first serial-to-parallel converter and communicating a second set of data from a second channel to a second serial-to-parallel converter; converting the first and second sets of data to a parallel format; monitoring the first and second serial-to-parallel converters in order to determine when one or more words of the respective data sets have accumulated in each of the first and second serial-to-parallel converters; writing one or more of the words that have accumulated in each of the first and second serial-to-parallel converters to a selected one of first and second memory banks; monitoring, by a single scheduler, the first and second memory banks to determine when enough of the words that were written to each of the first and second memory banks have formed one or more cells; and reading one or more of the cells out of a selected one of the first and second memory banks such that they may be communicated to an output communications link.