In laptops, the EC is what usually connects to the keyboard and trackpad/pointing stick, and it communicates with the chipset via LPC (a variant of the old ISA

In laptops, the EC is what usually connects to the keyboard and trackpad/pointing stick, and it communicates with the chipset via LPC (a variant of the old ISA bus). Many of them have a built-in 8042-compatible IP block for this. It looks exactly like a PS/2 keyboard and mouse to software, but the physical layer may no longer be present (some old laptops that support external PS/2 keyboard+mouse may have an actual PS/2 interface.) If the keyboard stopped working (completely), I'd suspect a bug or random glitch in the EC firmware.