Full custom chip set for high speed serial communications up to 2.48 Gbit/s

A full custom chip set has been developed (within the ESPRIT III SPIBOC project) to perform high speed serial-parallel conversion on an optical link. It is composed by two complementary circuits for 8-bit parallel to serial multiplexing and serial to parallel demultiplexing (@2.5 Gbit/s). Each integrated circuit has four identical modules in order to optimize area on board. An aggregated bit rate of 10 Gb/s is achieved. The purpose of the multiplexer chip, called HSS (High Speed Serialiser), is to adapt incoming data from external circuits to the laser driver required to transmit the information to the optical/electrical interface. In a similar way, the demultiplexer chip, called HSD (High Speed Deserialiser), takes the serial flow of transmitted data from the receiver and converts it to the primacy 8-bit-wide parallel format.