8b/10b encoding

In telecommunications, 8b/10b is a line code that maps 8-bit words to 10-bit symbols to achieve DC balance and bounded disparity, and at the same time provide enough state changes to allow reasonable clock recovery. This means that the difference between the counts of ones and zeros in a string of at least 20 bits is no more than two, and that there are not more than five ones or zeros in a row. This helps to reduce the demand for the lower bandwidth limit of the channel necessary to transfer the signal.

An 8b/10b code can be implemented in various ways with focus on different performance parameters. One implementation was designed by K. Odaka for the DAT digital audio recorder. Kees Schouhamer Immink designed an 8b/10b code for the DCC audio recorder. The IBM implementation was described in 1983 by Al Widmer and Peter Franaszek.