Protocols such as XAUI and PCI Express combine multiple serial transceiver connections to create a single higher throughput channel. Each serial transceiver connection is called one lane. Serial skew, variation in internal clock phases between lanes, and other factors can cause data that is transmitted at the same time to be misaligned across lanes in the received data. Channel bonding compensates for the misalignment by using the RX 8B/10B elastic FIFO as a variable latency block. Channel bonding is also called channel deskew or lane-to-lane deskew. GTY and GTYP transmitters used for a bonded channel all transmit a channel bonding character (or a sequence of characters) simultaneously. When the sequence is received, the GTY and GTYP receiver can determine the skew between each lane and adjust the latency of the RX 8B/10B elastic FIFO, so that data is presented without skew at the RX interconnect logic interface.
RX channel bonding supports 8B/10B encoded data but does not support these encoded data types:
- 64B/66B
- 64B/67B
- 128B/130B
- Scrambled data