Second Patent Issued to Avalon

Avalon Microelectronics is excited to announce the issue of their second United States patent, granted on June 9, 2009. The invention, “Skew-Correcting Apparatus using Dual Loopback”, was created jointly by Wally Haas, Mutema Pittman and Chuck Rumbolt.

The invention provides a skew (delay) detection and skew correction apparatus for high-speed data communications system with multiple data lanes. In FPGAs, skew occurs between transmission lanes upon transmission startup. The invention ensures that the skew between all lanes falls within a certain tolerance, enabling the FPGA to adhere to the SFI-5 standard. Most FPGAs will be deficient without the use of this product, so Avalon is extremely pleased to have this patent.

Skew is detected and corrected through dual loopback methods, comparing the transmission lanes to a reference lane to identify offsetting skew amounts to be injected into the data lanes to re-align the data lanes and achieve transmission lane alignment.

Founder and CTO Wally Haas says, “What is interesting about this patent is that no external equipment is required. SFI-5 can be spread over multiple chips which reduces the overall cost of implementing a 40Gb/s system.”