LVDS Fundamentals

With the recent developments in the communications market, the demand for throughput is becoming increasingly more crucial. Although older differential technologies provide significant signal integrity benefits compared to single-ended technologies, many of them consume much more power at lower throughput than LVDS. The LVDS standard was created to address applications in the data communications, telecommunications, server, peripheral, and computer markets where high-speed data transfer is necessary. LVDS offers a low cost, high speed, low power solution when compared to the standards of the past.

LVDS is defined in the TIA/EIA-644 standard. It is a low voltage, low power, differential technology used primarily for point-to-point and multi-drop cable driving applications. The standard was developed under the Data Transmission Interface committee TR30.2. It specifies a maximum data rate of 655 Mbps although some of today's applications are pushing well above this specification for a serial data stream.