Jabber counter mechanism for elastic buffer operation

摘要

An Elastic Buffer is provided to process data in a computer network and a write controller is provided to control memory storage operation of such an Elastic Buffer. The write controller may comprise a comparator mechanism which detects if link data from a source contains an IDLE signal; a Jabber counter mechanism which counts each cycle of a link clock in which an IDLE signal is not detected, and resets the count each time the IDLE signal is detected, and which asserts a DISABLE signal for a single link clock cycle if a count value reaches a programmed time-out value; and a logic gate which logically combines outputs from the comparator mechanism and the Jabber counter mechanism to generate a Write control signal for prohibiting a corresponding link data sequence from being stored in memory storage of the Elastic Buffer so as to prevent data overflow in the memory storage.