8b/10b encoding

In telecommunications, 8b/10b is a line code that maps 8-bit words to 10-bit symbols to achieve DC balance and bounded disparity, and at the same time provide enough state changes to allow reasonable clock recovery. This means that the difference between the counts of ones and zeros in a string of at least 20 bits is no more than two, and that there are not more than five ones or zeros in a row. This helps to reduce the demand for the lower bandwidth limit of the channel necessary to transfer the signal. An 8b/10b code can be implemented in various ways with focus on different performance parameters. One implementation was designed by K. Odaka for the DAT digital audio recorder. Kees Schouhamer Immink designed an 8b/10b code for the DCC audio recorder. The IBM implementation was described in 1983 by Al Widmer and Peter Franaszek. As the scheme name suggests, eight bits of data are transmitted as a 10-bit entity called a symbol, or character. The low five bits of data are encoded into a 6-bit group (the 5b/6b portion) and the top three bits are encoded into a 4-bit group (the 3b/4b portion). These code groups are concatenated together to form the 10-bit symbol that is transmitted on the wire. The data symbols are often referred to as D.x.y where x ranges over 0–31 and y over 0–7. Standards using the 8b/10b encoding also define up to 12 special symbols (or control characters) that can be sent in place of a data symbol. They are often used to indicate start-of-frame, end-of-frame, link idle, skip and similar link-level conditions. At least one of them (i.e. a "comma" symbol) needs to be used to define the alignment of the 10-bit symbols. They are referred to as K.x.y and have different encodings from any of the D.x.y symbols. Because 8b/10b encoding uses 10-bit symbols to encode 8-bit words, some of the possible 1024 (10 bit, 210) symbols can be excluded to grant a run-length limit of 5 consecutive equal bits and to ensure the difference between the count of zeros and ones to be no more than two.