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Serial communication

Type of data transfer / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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In telecommunication and data transmission, serial communication is the process of sending data one bit at a time, sequentially, over a communication channel or computer bus. This is in contrast to parallel communication, where several bits are sent as a whole, on a link with several parallel channels.

MIL-STD-188-100_char_struct_for_async_comms_1972-11-15.svg
Standard character structure for asynchronous data communication consisting of 10 elements for a 7-bit ASCII character.
Serial_and_Parallel_Data_Transmission.svg
Serial and parallel data transmission of 010010112. Standard bit sequence is least significant bit first (D0 to D7 in acending order).[1] D0 is received first via serial transmission. All bits are received simultaneously via parallel transmission.

Serial communication is used for all long-haul communication and most computer networks, where the cost of cable and synchronization difficulties make parallel communication impractical. Serial computer buses are becoming more common even at shorter distances, as improved signal integrity and transmission speeds in newer serial technologies have begun to outweigh the parallel bus's advantage of simplicity (no need for serializer and deserializer, or SerDes) and to outstrip its disadvantages (clock skew, interconnect density). The migration from PCI to PCI Express is an example.