A Circuit to Eliminate Serial Skew in High-Speed Serial Communication Channels

This brief relates to communication established through high-speed serial links. A serial communication channel can be formed by grouping multiple high-speed serial communication lanes to achieve greater serial bandwidth. Such channels require circuitry to eliminate relative skew across multiple lanes to ensure data integrity in the receiver. Channel bonding is a mechanism used to synchronize serial communication channels in larger data rate and bandwidth applications. This brief presents an approach to channel bonding that optimizes area, power, and initialization time and yields better performance. The ideas discussed here use a delay-based model and explore the possibility of performing channel bonding in a centralized way. The methodology is deployed in the Aurora Protocol Solution Suite, and a comparative analysis with another state-of-the-art approach is performed.