Method and apparatus for extracting an embedded clock from a digital

Abstract

A data and clock recovery arrangement, for a high speed fiber optic digital communication system in which a serial digital bit stream is pre-scramble encoded by interleaving complementary pairs of overhead bits between successive groups of data bits, and then scrambled and transmitted to a receive site, comprises a data rate independent variable bit rate synchronizer, a descrambler and a decoder. The data rate independent variable bit synchronizer processes the received scrambled and encoded digital bit stream to derive a variable data rate synchronization clock signal. The synchronizer is capable of accepting any data rate within the operational data clock signal range of the system, and automatically tunes itself to the data clock signal embedded in the received scrambled and encoded serial data stream, so as to output respective scrambled and encoded serial data and clock signals. The descrambler descrambles the scrambled and encoded serial digital bit stream using the variable data rate synchronization clock signal, and the decoder decodes the descrambled serial digital bit stream to extract groups of data bits exclusive of the complementary pairs of overhead bits and to derive an output clock signal having a frequency coincident with the data rate of the data bits.