Introduction
Driven by market demand for ever-increasing network bandwidth, high-speed digital communications equipment manufacturers look to communication semiconductor suppliers for the latest in high-speed standards-based digital communications protocol building blocks. Several Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) vendors have taken up this challenge and produced products specifically targeted to various segments of high-speed serial digital communications designs. As a result, communications and embedded computing product designs are increasingly utilizing FPGAs with embedded serializer-deserializers (SerDes) for critical high-speed transceiver and serial protocol processing.