Method and apparatus for detecting and preventing the communication of

Abstract

A method and apparatus for communicating serial data at very high actual and effective data rates with a high probability of detecting single and multiple bits errors, even burst errors. The method and apparatus generates at least three parity bits which are sent with each serial data word: an even parity bit taken over all the even bits (including bit 0), an odd parity bit taken over all of the odd parity bits, and a third to parity bit that is an even parity bit taken over every fourth data bit. These parity bits are generated and transmitted along with each data word. At the receiving end, the data portion of each received serial word is stored in a register. The parity bit portion of each received serial word is stored in another register within a parity bit checker. The parity bit checker generates three parity bits taken over the received data word in the same manner that the transmitted parity bits were generated. If there are no errors in the data, the parity bits of the received data word should be the same as the parity bits transmitted with the data word. If they are not equal, an error has occurred. This method and apparatus provides error detection that is good as that of ATM data packets, which is it preferred application. Yet all these benefits are provided by a method and apparatus that require very little bandwidth and very little time for detection.