Patent ID: 7068650

Claim:
A method for transferring data between first and second serial/deserializer (SerDes) units, coupled by a serial link and operating, respectively, at a fast and a slow data rate, with the fast data rate equal to the slow data rate multiplied by N, where N is an integer, with the first SerDes unit coupled to a first data source/sink by a parallel interface, operating at the slow data rate, and having N parallel channels, and with the second SerDes unit coupled to a second data/source sink by a parallel interface, operating at the slow data rate, and having at least one parallel channel said method comprising the acts of: at the first data source/sink, transmitting duplicates of a first data stream from the data source/sink to the first SerDes unit, on each of the N parallel channels, with the first data stream transmitted at the slow data rate; at the first SerDes unit, interleaving the duplicates of the first data stream received from the N channels into a first serial interleaved data stream transmitted at the fast data rate; at the first SerDes unit, transmitting the first serial interleaved data stream to the second SerDes unit over the serial link; at the second SerDes unit, sampling the first serial interleaved data stream as the slow data rate to recover duplicates of the first parallel data stream; and at the second data source sink, receiving the first data stream from the second SerDes.