8B/10B establishing connection and synchronization

[Marcin Rupniewski]

How 8B/10B connection is established from point of view of synchronization? (Receiving data looks as string of bits - there is a need to figure out when there is beginning of 10B structure)

How the control bit looks like?
Any manuals and doc will be very helfull.
Thanks

[Uwe Zessin]

If you are talking about Fibre Channel media:
8B/10B is the encoding on the FC-1 layer. It has nothing to do with etablishing an FC link. There are no 'control bits' - tirst-time synchronization is done by sending special bit pattern (primitive signals), if I recall correctly.

[Ralf Loehmann_2]

Hello Marcin,

it looks like you are looking for the 8B/10B transmission code. I will add a link to the standard, where it is described, but I would recommand to read this better in a book about SAN and fibre channel.

Here part of the standard, describing this:
**********
Information to be transmitted over a Fibre shall be encoded eight bits at a time into an 10-bit Transmission Character and then sent serially bit-by-bit across the link. Information received over the link shall be collected ten bits at a time, and those Transmission Characters that are used for data, called data characters, shall be decoded into the correct eight-bit codes. The 10-bit transmission code supports all 256 eight-bit combinations. Some of the
remaining Transmission Characters, referred to as special characters, are used for functions that are to be distinguishable
from the contents of a frame.
The primary rationale for use of a transmission code is to improve the Transmission Characteristics of information
to be transferred across a Fibre. The encodings defined by the transmission code ensure that sufficient transitions
are present in the serial bit stream to make clock recovery possible at the receiver. Such encoding also greatly increases the likelihood of detecting any single or multiple bit errors that may occur during transmission and reception of information. In addition, some of the special characters of the transmission code contain a distinct and easily recognizable bit pattern (a comma) that assists a receiver in achieving word alignment on the incoming bit
stream.

*****************

Here the link to this manual, see chapter 5:
http://www.t11.org/ftp/t11/pub/fc/fs-2/05-190v3.pdf
I reached this link from here:
http://t11.org/index.htm

This is the page, where you can reach the complete Fibre Standard, but it is a pretty dry read. My recommandation again find a good book about it or get a trainings course about this.

Overall it is pretty low in the hardware what you are looking for. This is nice to know about it, but this is used for people designing devices or need to do an indeepth troubleshooting into Fibre.

I hope still this helps to answer your question.