A flit-based packetization approach is used for transmitting information between electronic components. A protocol stack can generate transaction layer packets from information received from a transmitting device, assemble the transaction layer packets into one or more flits, and protect the flits with a flit-level cyclic redundancy check (CRC) scheme and a flit-level forward error correction or parallel-forward error correction (FEC) scheme. Flit-level FEC schemes can provide improved latencies and efficiencies over per-lane FEC schemes. To improve retry probability, flits can contain information indicating whether immediately preceding flits are null flits. Receivers can avoid sending a retry request for a corrupted flit if a seceding flit indicates the corrupted flit is a null fit. Parity flits can be used to protect groups of flits and correct single-flit errors.