The GUC's EMS-PHY SerDes supports multiple high speed wire-line communication standards. Supported standards include 1GE, XAUI, RXAUI, XFI, 10GBase-KR, PCIe Gen1/ Gen2/Gen3, SATA Gen1/Gen2/Gen3, SAS Gen1/Gen2/Gen3 and analogous standards. The receiver equalizes and recovers incoming serial data and de-serializes the data stream into selectable 10/16/20/32/64 bit-wide data bus. The transmitter, similarly, serializes selectable 10/16/20/32/64 bit-wide data bus and drives the serialized data off-chip with built-in adjustable de-emphasis (FFE). EMS-PHY SerDes includes the physical media attachment layer (PMA) which is implemented as a hard macro and the physical coding sub-layer (PCS) which may be licensed separately through GUC or its 3rd party partners.