The link layer maintains the link and supports all SATA link layer functionality, including:
- Out-of-band (OOB) transmit signaling
- Frame negotiation and arbitration
- Envelope framing/deframing
- Cyclic redundancy check (CRC) calculation (receive and transmit)
- 8b/10b encoding/decoding
- Flow control
- Frame acknowledgment and status
- Data width conversion
- Data scrambling/descrambling
- Primitive transmission
- Primitive detection and dropping
- Power management