16. The circuit of claim 15 , wherein the decoders resolve the character types from a group consisting of the SOF character, the EOF character, valid data characters, and an idle character; and the parser invalidates those of the characters determined to be outside a frame delineated by at least one of the SOF character and the EOF character detected.
15. A circuit to interface communications channel comprising: serial-to-parallel receivers configured to receive serial data signals of data lanes of the communications channel and to recover characters of parallel format from the data lanes; decoders configured to determine character types of the characters recovered by the serial-to-parallel receivers of from the data lanes; detectors configured to detect a start-of-frame (SOF) character and an end-of-frame (EOF) character; a parser configured to parse the characters recovered by the serial-to-parallel receivers based on the character types determined by the decoders and based on placement of the characters relative to the SOF character detected for separating out valid data and invalid data from the characters recovered; a packer configured to group the valid data from the characters parsed to provide a valid data group; and a generator configured to provide the SOF character as a first sideband signal associated with the valid data group for sideband encapsulation.