Out-of-Band Communication in a Serial Communication Environment

摘要

The present disclosure describes a serializer and a deserializer. The serializer can receive a sequence of information in a parallel format and control information over a serial interface from a host device. The serializer converts the sequence of information in the parallel format to provide the sequence of information in a serial format to the deserializer which converts the sequence of information in to serial format to the sequence of information in the parallel format. The serializer passes through the control information to provide the control information to the deserializer which is similarly passed through by the deserializer. The control information can include one or more control packets and/or one or more link pulses to train one or more other serializers and/or one or more other deserializers communicating with each other over a communication channel.