Misplaced Pages

Serial communication

Article snapshot taken from Wikipedia with creative commons attribution-sharealike license. Give it a read and then ask your questions in the chat. We can research this topic together.

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Evice (talk | contribs) at 01:27, 16 May 2005. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Revision as of 01:27, 16 May 2005 by Evice (talk | contribs)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)

You must add a |reason= parameter to this Cleanup template – replace it with {{Cleanup|reason=<Fill reason here>}}, or remove the Cleanup template.

In telecommunications and computer science, serial communications refers to any data transmission scheme in which data is sent one symbol at at time, sequentially over a communications channel.

The communications links across which computers—or parts of computers—talk to one another may be either serial or parallel. A parallel link transmits several streams of data (perhaps representing particular bits of a stream of bytes) along multiple channels (wires, printed circuit tracks, optical fibres, etc.); a serial link transmits a single stream of data.

At first sight it would seem that a serial link must be inferior to a parallel one, because it can transmit less data on each clock tick. However, there are plenty of compensating advantages.

  • A serial connection takes up less space.
  • The extra space can be used to isolate it better from its surroundings.
  • Not having multiple conductors in close proximity means less crosstalk at higher frequencies.
  • Clock skew between the different channels is not an issue.
  • These last three considerations mean that a serial connection can, all else being equal, be clocked considerably faster than a parallel one.

Examples of serial communication architectures

See also

External links