Abstract: Described are a device and system to transmit 8B/10B code groups including Ethernet data frames in a device-to-device interconnection. Control messages may be interleaved among the 8B/10B code groups for transmission to a destination device.

Abstract: A method and apparatus for transfer of power state data between network components. An embodiment of a method includes determining a command for a computer system, the computer system including a first network component and a second network component. The first network component and the second network component are linked by an interface. The method further includes inserting a message regarding the power state change in a data frame and transferring the data frame from the first network component to the second component via the interface, the data frame being transferred in a period between data packets.

Abstract: Described are a device and system to transmit 8B/10B code groups including Ethernet data frames in a device-to-device interconnection. Control messages may be interleaved among the 8B/10B code groups for transmission to a destination device.

Abstract: A multi-MAC chip for an Ethernet, the multi-MAC chip generating different random variables for each MAC layer so that each MAC has a distinct backoff interval when there is a collision. This avoids a possible live-lock state. In one embodiment, the random variables are generated by adding distinct numbers to a random variable generated according to the truncated binary exponential backoff algorithm. In another embodiment, each MAC stops a free-running counter for some specified number of clock cycles upon occurrence of a distinct event, and each counter for each colliding MAC is sampled upon a collision to provide random integers used to calculate backoff intervals for each colliding MAC.