Physical coding sublayer

The physical coding sublayer (PCS) is a networking protocol sublayer in the Fast Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet, and 10 Gigabit Ethernet standards. It resides at the top of the physical layer (PHY), and provides an interface between the physical medium attachment (PMA) sublayer and the media-independent interface (MII). It is responsible for data encoding and decoding, scrambling and descrambling, alignment marker insertion and removal, block and symbol redistribution, and lane block synchronization and deskew.