Techniques and mechanisms for providing on-chip link control functionality to facilitate emulation of a communication. In an embodiment, an integrated circuit (IC) chip includes a physical layer (PHY) which supports communication compatible with a high-speed serial interface standard. A link controller of the IC chip is coupled between the PHY and an interconnect architecture which variously couples a host and other resources of the IC chip to each other. A test controller of the IC chip signals a test mode to implement a loopback path of the link controller in lieu of one or more functional paths for communication with the PHY. In another embodiment, signal output by the loopback path emulate a communication from a resource other than the test controller.