DC-Balanced Improvement of Interlaken Protocol

Abstract

High-speed serial data communication is essential for connecting peripherals in high-performance computing systems. Interlaken is a high-speed serial data communication protocol that has been widely adopted in various applications as it can run on multiple medias such as PCBs, blackplans or over cables. The Interlaken uses 64b/67b line coding to maintain the run length(RL) and the running disparity(RD) with the advantage of an inversion bit that indicates whether the receiver must flip the data or not. By using the inversion bit, it increases 1 bit overhead to every data word. This paper proposes 64b/i67b line coding technique for encoding and decoding to improve the cumulative running disparity of 64b/67b without additional bit overhead. The results have been obtained from simulations that use random data and the Squash data set, and the proposed method reduces the maximum cumulative running disparity value up to 33%.