Patent 6944697 was granted and assigned to Silicon Laboratories, Inc. on September, 2005 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A method includes the step of serially clocking a mask value through a plurality of subscriber line interface circuits (SLICs) until each SLIC stores a corresponding portion of the mask value, and serially communicating a command to the plurality of SLICs. Each SLIC responds to the command only if enabled by the corresponding portion of the mask value.