Aspects of a method and system for energy efficient networking over a serial communication channel are provided. In this regard, one or more circuits in an Ethernet PHY that communicates over one or more serial communication channels may transmit and/or receive physical layer signals to maintain and/or refresh synchronization and/or training parameters while operating in an energy saving mode. The Ethernet PHY may transition out of the energy saving mode upon transmitting and/or receiving a wake sequence via the serial communication channel(s), where the wake sequence comprises one or more deterministic forward error correction (FEC) block in instances that FEC is utilized for communications via the serial communication channel(s). The one or more circuits in the Ethernet PHY may be operable to perform forward error correction (FEC) functions and one or more of the FEC functions may be disabled while remaining ones of the FEC functions are enabled.