A chipset for gigabit rate data communication (using optical fibres)

A gigabit-rate data link consisting of four custom silicon bipolar chips for transmitting parallel data between elements of a distributed computer system is discussed. A transmission rate of 16 bits in parallel at 50 MHz or with encoding overhead, a serial rate of 1 Gb/s is demonstrated. The link utilizes an encoding scheme that is bandwidth efficient. Unlike other links, the phase/frequency-locked loop also provides frame synchronization and requires no trimming for data retiming, either in production or later.<>