An overview of high-speed serial I/O trends, techniques and standards

The paper provides a brief overview of the basic building blocks within a high-speed serial transceiver, provides an outline of the major interconnect standards utilizing the highspeed serial I/O circuitry and gives the basics behind the design techniques required to design and implement a typical multi-GHz serial I/O device successfully. Several major design obstacles are presented, followed by a discussion of the potential design techniques that may be used to overcome such implementation issues. The paper covers two main design approaches: low swing differential signaling and multilevel signaling.