High bandwidth communications system having multiple serial links

A data communication system includes a phase splitting circuit to split a high speed parallel data word into a number of individual parallel data bytes, a byte multiplexor for each of the phases of a phase splitting circuit, encoding and serialization circuits for converting each byte such as an 8-bit byte to an encoded form suitable for serial transmission such as by employing the Widmer et al. 8-bit/10-bit code, transmitting each encoded byte across one of a number of serial transmission links to a receiving device where the data is deserialized and decoded to recover the original byte which is then synchronized by a byte synchronization circuit. The byte synchronization circuits are then coupled to a word synchronization circuit where the original high bandwidth data word is recovered and transmitted on an internal high speed parallel bus within the receiving device.