The TLK2500 multigigabit transceiver can be used for ultra-high-speed bidirectional point-to-point data transmissions. The TLK2500 supports an effective serial interface speed of 1.6 Gbps to 2.5 Gbps. The primary application of this chip is to provide very high-speed I/O data channels for point-to-point baseband data transmission over controlled impedance media of approximately 50 . The transmission media can be printed-circuit board, copper cables, or fiber-optic cable. The maximum rate and distance of data transfer is dependent upon the attenuation characteristics of the media and the noise coupling to the environment. This device can also be used to replace parallel data transmission architectures by providing a reduction in the number of traces, connector pins, and transmit/receive pins. Parallel data loaded into the transmitter is delivered to the receiver over a serial channel, which can be a coaxial copper cable, a controlled impedance back plane, or an optical link. It is then reconstructed into its original parallel format. It offers significant power and cost savings over current solutions as well as scalability for higher and lower data rates in the future. The TLK2500 performs the data parallel-to-serial, serial-to-parallel conversion, and clock extraction functions for a physical layer interface device. The serial transceiver interface operates at a maximum speed of 2.5 Gbps. The transmitter latches 16-bit parallel data at a rate based on the supplied reference clock. The 16-bit parallel data is internally encoded into 20 bits using an 8B/10B encoding format. The resulting 20-bit word is then transmitted differentially at 20x the reference clock rate. The receiver section performs the serial-to-parallel conversion on the input data synchronizing the resulting 20-bit wide parallel data to the extracted reference clock. It then decodes the 20-bit wide data using 8B/10B decoding format resulting in 16 bits of parallel data at the receive data pins. This results in an effective data payload of 1.28 Gbps to 2 Gbps (16-bit data x clock rate).