[μblog] We talk “serial”

The excerpt on the picture is from an Embedded C book [1], and somehow I find it very funny. Anyway, it made me think how serial communications are the core of our data communication protocols and technology today. And it is kind of counter-intuitive, since parallel communication would give you more bandwidth by adding more wires.

Indeed, in the past, parallel communication was the choice, until the shortcomings of data skew, cross talk, signal integrity, size and power consumption came up when increasing bandwith and frequency. Technology had no choice but to rely on serial channels. Look around: USB, SATA, HDMI, and Ethernet to name a few.

Great efforts on the industry on mechanisms and standardization are made, as on MIPI UniPro, a widely used (serial) layered protocol on mobile gadgets.
In this data-driven world, we are heavily relying on serial communication, and I think it is curious.

[1] Oualline, Stephen. Bare Metal C: Embedded Programming for the Real World. No Starch Press.