High speed bit serial systems

Abstract

A limiting factor in the operating speed of a bit-serial integrated circuit is the stray capacitance associated with interconnections of functional elements on the integrated circuit, which stray capacitance tends to be significantly larger than capacitances at signal nodes internal to a functional element. To overcome the limitations imposed by the capacitance associated with the interconnections, bit-serial signals are coupled from one functional element to another by multiplexing circuitry which splits the bit-serial signal provided by a functional element into parallel bit-serial-signals of lesser bit-rate, and then recombines the parallel signals for application to another functional element.