A DC-Balanced, Partitioned-Block, 8B/10B Transmission Code

This paper describes a byte-oriented binary transmission code and its implementation. This code is particularly well suited for high-speed local area networks and similar data links, where the information format consists of packets, variable in length, from about a dozen up to several hundred 8-bit bytes. The proposed transmission code translates each source byte into a constrained 10-bit binary sequence which has excellent performance parameters near the theoretical limits for 8B/10B codes. The maximum run length is 5 and the maximum digital sum variation is 6. A single error in the encoded bits can, at most, generate an error burst of length 5 in the decoded domain. A very simple implementation of the code has been accomplished by partitioning the coder into 5B/6B and 3B/4B subordinate coders.