Advantages of 8B/10B encoding | Disadvantages of 8B/10B Block coding

This page covers advantages and disadvantages of 8B/10B Block coding. It mentions benefits or advantages of 8B/10B encoding and drawbacks or disadvantages of 8B/10B encoding.

What is 8B/10B encoding?

Introduction:
It is block coding technique. Like 4B/5B encoding, it also uses redundancy to ensure synchronization and to improve performance of this line coding. It offers inherent error detection capability.

The "8B/10B" indicates that this block coding takes 8 bit blocks as input and produces 10 bit blocks as output. The 8B/10B block coding is a combination of 5B/6B and 3B/4B encoding as shown.

The MSBs of 8 bit block is fed into 5B/6B encoder where as 3 LSBs is fed into 3B/4B encoder modules. The coding has 2¹⁰ - s⁸ redundant groups.

Benefits or advantages of 8B/10B encoding

Following are the benefits or advantages of 8B/10B encoding:
➨It uses disparity controller to keep track of excess 0s over 1s (or 1s ove 0s). This helps to prevent long run of consecutive 0s or 1s.
➨The redundant groups can be used for disparity checking and error detection.
➨It is better than 4B/5B coding due to its built-in error checking capability and better synchronization.

Drawbacks or disadvantages of 8B/10B encoding

Following are the drawbacks or disadvantages of 8B/10B encoding:
➨The redundant data is the overhead for this coding technique. This increases bandwidth requirements.

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