US Patent 9197531 Methods and apparatus of time stamping for multi-lane protocols

One embodiment relates to a method of determining an arrival time of a data packet which has data striped across a plurality of lanes of a multi-lane link. Word arrival times for a subset of the words of the data packet are determined, each word arrival time corresponding to an arrival time of a word of the data packet at an individual lane of the multi-lane link. The arrival time of the data packet is determined using the word arrival times for the subset of words. Another embodiment relates to a method of determining an arrival time of a data packet which uses a measure of average fullness for a set of the FIFO buffers. Other embodiments and features are also disclosed.