A parallel SONET scrambler/descrambler architecture

Scrambling of the bits in a synchronous optical network (SONET) frame is needed to keep the frequency content of the transmitted signals near the actual line rate, while descrambling is required on the receive end of a SONET transceiver in order to retrieve the actual bits that comprised the SONET frame. For any SONET line rate above the OC-1 (51.840 Mb/s), this operation is difficult using the conventional bit serial architecture. It is demonstrated how scrambling and descrambling can be performed on an OC-12 SONET frame (622 Mb/s) using word level parallelism. This architecture enables the SONET scramble/descramble operations to be performed on field programmable gate arrays.<>