Apparatus and method for hardware creation of a header

A media access controller (MAC) is configured with a header creator circuit. The header creator circuit is configured with logic for receiving a data packet and determining whether the received data packet has an existing packet header prepended thereto. The header creator circuit is further configured to determine if the length of the received data packet includes a cyclic redundancy code. Still further, the header creator circuit is configured to determine a packet header length field value for the received data packet. If the header creator circuit determines that a cyclic redundancy code needs to be included with the received data packet, then the header creator circuit is able to generate a CRC flag. If the data packet needs to be encrypted, then the header creator circuit will generate an encryption flag if it is determined that the received data packet should be encrypted. Finally, the header creator circuit generates a packet header having a plurality of fields.