Techniques are disclosed for flexible allocation of address pins of an
interface bus to particular sub-buses of the interface bus. The interface
bus is between at least one physical layer device and a link layer device
in a communication system. Each of the sub-buses has an interface block
of the link layer device associated therewith, the interface bus being
configurable to carry a composite address signal having a plurality of
portions each associated with one of the address pins of the interface
bus. The interface blocks of the link layer device are controlled such
that each of at least a subset of the interface blocks utilizes only
particular ones of the address pins that are controllably allocated to
the associated sub-bus in accordance with configuration information
stored in the link layer device. The composite address signal is
generated as a combination of address outputs of the interface blocks.