A method that enables an optical transceiver (or optical transmitter or optical receiver) to perform consistency checking such as Cyclic Redundancy Checking (CRC) in the background while the transceiver is in operation. The optical transceiver includes a system memory and a consistency checker component. The optical transceiver determines that consistency checking is to be performed and identifies non-contiguous static portions of the system memory to be checked. The consistency checker reads the non-contiguous static portions of system memory and determines whether or not the portions of system memory are consistent with an expected consistency check value.
CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS
This application claims the benefit of U.S. Provisional Application No. 60/640,622, filed Dec. 30, 2004, which is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety. This application is also related to U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/073,886, filed Mar. 7, 2005 entitled "Consistency Checking over Internal Information in an Optical Transceiver" which is also incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.
