HOTLink Receivers and transmitters are point-to-point communications building blocks that transfer data over serial links

Serial communication

In telecommunication and computer science, serial communication is the process of sending data one bit at a time, sequentially, over a communication channel or computer bus. This is in contrast to parallel communication, where several bits are sent as a whole, on a link with several parallel channels...

 (fiber

Optical fiber

An optical fiber is a flexible, transparent fiber made of a pure glass not much wider than a human hair. It functions as a waveguide, or "light pipe", to transmit light between the two ends of the fiber. The field of applied science and engineering concerned with the design and application of...

, coaxial

Coaxial

In geometry, coaxial means that two or more forms share a common axis; it is the three-dimensional linear analogue of concentric.Coaxial cable, as a common example, has a wire conductor in the centre a circumferential outer conductor and an insulating medium called the dielectric separating...

, and twisted pair

Twisted pair

Twisted pair cabling is a type of wiring in which two conductors are twisted together for the purposes of canceling out electromagnetic interference from external sources; for instance, electromagnetic radiation from unshielded twisted pair cables, and crosstalk between neighboring pairs...

). The main purpose is to replace parallel transmissions over longer distances with serial links. Example applications include workstations, servers, mass storage, and video.

Lowspeed data rates range 150 - 160 Mbits/second. Standard HOTLink data rates range 160 - 330 Mbits/second. "Higher" transfer rate range is 160 - 400 Mbits/second. Eight bits of data is processed at a time. Serial data is then shifted out of the three differential positive ECL

Emitter-coupled logic

In electronics, emitter-coupled logic , is a logic family that achieves high speed by using an overdriven BJT differential amplifier with single-ended input, whose emitter current is limited to avoid the slow saturation region of transistor operation....

 (PECL) serial ports at a bit rate which is ten times the byte rate. The power consumption is ~1 Watt

Watt

The watt is a derived unit of power in the International System of Units , named after the Scottish engineer James Watt . The unit, defined as one joule per second, measures the rate of energy conversion.-Definition:...

.

See also

• 8b/10b encoding
  8B/10B encoding
  In telecommunications, 8b/10b is a line code that maps 8-bit symbols to 10-bit symbols to achieve DC-balance and bounded disparity, and yet provide enough state changes to allow reasonable clock recovery. This means that the difference between the count of 1s and 0s in a string of at least 20 bits...
  
  
• Ethernet
  Ethernet
  Ethernet is a family of computer networking technologies for local area networks commercially introduced in 1980. Standardized in IEEE 802.3, Ethernet has largely replaced competing wired LAN technologies....
  
  
• Asynchronous Transfer Mode
  Asynchronous Transfer Mode
  Asynchronous Transfer Mode is a standard switching technique designed to unify telecommunication and computer networks. It uses asynchronous time-division multiplexing, and it encodes data into small, fixed-sized cells. This differs from approaches such as the Internet Protocol or Ethernet that...
  
   (ATM)
• IEEE 1394 interface
  IEEE 1394 interface
  The IEEE 1394 interface is a serial bus interface standard for high-speed communications and isochronous real-time data transfer, frequently used by personal computers, as well as in digital audio, digital video, automotive, and aeronautics applications. The interface is also known by the brand...
  
   (Firewire)
• Asynchronous serial interface
  Asynchronous serial interface
  Asynchronous Serial Interface, or ASI, is a streaming data format which often carries an MPEG Transport Stream .An ASI signal can carry one or multiple SD, HD or audio programs that are already compressed, not like an uncompressed SD-SDI or HD-SDI . An ASI signal can be at varying transmission...
  
  (ASI)