A novel encoding scheme is disclosed, enabling the physical layer to identify packet boundaries by looking at a few selected bits while improving the error detection capability and maintaining low overhead for low power states. By eliminating the overhead of 8b/10b encoding for the physical layer, the encoding scheme achieves better error detection ability than current 8b/10b encoding. Further, the novel encoding scheme provides additional error detection capability, a low overhead mechanism to exit low power states, and a mechanism to handle problematic packets.