Serial transmission is often preferred over parallel transmission, even though it has a lower transfer rate, due to its simplicity, low cost and ease of use. Many peripherals also do not require the high data rates of a parallel interface.
The number of changes/symbols transmitted, per second. When there are only two states, this is equal to the Bit rate.
The number of bits transferred per second.
The rate at which meaningful information is sent - the bit rate less the overhead of start and stop bits.
The asynchronous serial interface is so called because the transmitted and received data are not synchronised over any extended period of time and therefore no special means of synchronising the clocks at the transmitter and receiver is necessary. The fundamental problem lies in how to split the data stream into individual bits and how to then reconstruct the original data. The format of the data on a serial data link is in fact simple, and is shown in Figure below. Data is grouped and transferred in characters, where one character is a unit comprising 7 or 8 bits of information plus 2 to 4 control bits. The idle state is referred to as the mark level and traditionally corresponds to a logical 1 level. A character is transmitted by placing the line in the space level (logical 0) for one period T, then the information is sent bit by bit, with each bit T seconds long, then the transmitter calculates the parity bit and transmits it and finally one or two stop bits are sent by returning the line to mark level.
The data word length may be 7 or 8 bits with odd, even, or no parity bits plus either 1 or 2 stop bits. This allows for 12 different possible formats for serial transmission. Also, there are at least 7 different commonly used values for the bit period T. Thus, connecting two devices via a serial link may be difficult due to all the available options.
At the receiving end, the receiver monitors the link, looking for the start bit, and once detected, the receiver waits until the end of the start bit and then samples the next N bits at their centres using a locally generated clock. Once the character has been assembled from the received bits, the parity is checked, and if the calculated parity does not agree with the received parity bit, a parity error flag is set to indicate a transmission error. The most critical aspect is the receiver timing. The falling edge of the start bit triggers the receiver's local clock, which samples each incoming bit at its nominal centre. Suppose the receiver clock waits T/2 seconds from the falling edge of a start bit and samples the incoming data every T seconds thereafter until the stop bit has been sampled. Let us assume that the receiver clock is running slow, so that a sample is taken every T+dt seconds. The first bit of the data is thus sampled at (T+dt)/2 + (T+dt) seconds after the falling edge of the start bit. The stop bit is thus sampled at time (T+dt)/2 + N(T+dt), where N is the number of bits in the character following the start bit. The total accumulated error in sampling is thus (T+dt)/2 + N(T+dt) - (T/2+NT), or (2N+1)dt/2 seconds. This situation is shown in Figure below.
For correct operation, the stop bit is sampled within T/2 seconds of its centre.
Thus, if N=9 for a 7-bit character with one stop bit and one parity bit, the maximum permissible error is 100/19 = 5%. Fortunately, today's clocks are all crystal controlled and the error between two clocks of the same frequency is often less than a fraction of a percent.
The most obvious disadvantage of asynchronous serial transfer is the need for start, stop and parity bits for each transmitted character. If 7-bit characters are used, the overall efficiency is only 7/(7+3) = 70%. Another problem is when asynchronous transfer is used to, for example, dump binary data onto a storage device: If the data is arranged in 8-bit bytes and all 256 values represent valid binary data it is difficult to embed control characters (e.g. tape start or stop) within the data stream because the same character must be used both for pure data and control purposes.
The type of asynchronous serial data link described in previous sections is widely used to link processors to relatively slow peripherals such as printers and terminals. Where information must be transferred, for example, between individual computers in a network, synchronous serial data transmission is more popular. In synchronous serial data transmission, the information is transmitted continuously without gaps between adjacent groups of bits. Note that synchronous data links are often used to transmit entire blocks of data instead of ASCII-encoded characters.
As this type of link involves long streams of data, the clocks at the receiving and transmitting end must be permanently synchronised. Of course, one could simply add a clock line to the link where the transmitter's clock signal is passed to the receiver. However, this requires an additional line and is thus an unpopular choice. A better solution is to encode the data in such a way that the synchronising signal is included in the data signal. The figure below shows one of the many methods which may be used. In this case the data is phase-encoded (or Manchester encoded) by combining the clock signal with the data signal. A logical one is thus represented by a positive transition in the centre of the bit and a logical zero by a negative transition. At the receiver, the data signal may easily be split into the clock and pure data components. Integrated circuits that perform this modulation and demodulation are readily available.
Having divided the incoming data stream into individual data elements (i.e. bits), the next step is to group the bits into meaningful units. The incoming data must be examined for recognisable bit groups which signify the beginning of a block of data, the end of it or some other control character.
Parity is normally taken as odd, because a single pulse on the line, taken as a start bit, records as a bad byte.
The parity check will detect one erroneous bit in each byte. There are more serious methods of encoding data that can send messages down noisy lines, and recover from erroneous bits.
Transmit control - baud rate, parity, send now
Transmit data - the byte to be sent
Receive control - byte available, parity check,