Status signals that are generated by one or more FIFO buffers in a high-speed serial interface ("HSSI") may be combined with transmitted data samples in order to correlate the status signals to the respective data samples. The combined data and status signals may be transmitted either to the subsequent stages of the HSSI datapath or directly to the PLD via a dedicated path with less latency. The combined data and status signals can be used to determine whether a data sample corresponds to a valid data sample or an idle sequence, thereby allowing a user to control the flow of data.