Recovery of a hot-pluggable serial communication link

A hot-pluggable communication circuit, comprising:

• a transmitter configured to serially transmit a training sequence during initialization, and following the initialization to serially transmit a first serial sequence including a plurality of bits;
• a receiver configured to generate a received sequence of a plurality of blocks;
• a communication link for coupling the transmitter and the receiver, the communication link configured to connect and disconnect the transmitter and the receiver;
• and
• wherein the receiver includes:
• a link recovery circuit configured to initiate the initialization in response to the plurality of blocks, in the received sequence after one of a plurality of control blocks in the plurality of blocks and before a next one of the plurality of control blocks, numbering greater than a threshold number;
• a clock-and-data recovery circuit configured to recover a received clock signal locked to the training sequence while the communication link connects the transmitter and the receiver during the initialization, and following the initialization to recover the received clock signal locked to the first serial sequence and to serially recover a second serial sequence including the plurality of bits;
• and
• an aligner configured to decode the received sequence of the plurality of blocks from the second serial sequence of the plurality of bits.