EARLY DETECTION AND INDICATION OF LINK LOSS

This disclosure describes techniques for detecting link loss in a physical layer receiver of a communication system. The system includes a slicer coupled to receive, at a slicer input, a signal from a channel equalizer and map the signal to a physical coding sublayer (PCS) level at a slicer output and processor coupled to at least one of the slicer input or the slicer output. The processor is configured to analyze a window of consecutive samples at the at least one of the slicer input or the slicer output over a time window; increment a counter as a function of the window of consecutive samples at the at least one of the slicer input or the slicer output; compare the counter to a threshold; and generate a signal indicating link loss in response to determining that the counter corresponds to the threshold independently of a timer.