The physical layer is responsible for the transmission of the raw bit stream over the PHYsical transport medium and is the lowest layer within the OSI network model. With high-speed interfaces such as the serial protocols USB 2.0, PCI Express®, SATA, and DDR2, the PHY provides the bridge between the digital and modulated parts of the interface. The trend is to integrate these mixed-signal interfaces into SoC’s that are manufactured in digital logic deep sub-micron technologies with channel lengths of 65nm and 45nm.
By Navraj S. Nandra, Director of Marketing Mixed-Signal IP, Synopsys Inc.
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