Inter-system data communication channel comprised of parallel electrical conductors that simulates the performance of a bit serial optical communications link

A self-timed interface (STI) links two physically separated systems or nodes. A transmit state machine forms each word in a serial bit stream into a plurality of bytes and generates idle and data character sequences. Each byte is separately encoded in a run-length-limited code, along with its idle and data character sequences. Each of the plurality of bytes is transmitted on a separate conducting line along with a transmit clock signal that is also transmitted on a separate line. At the receiver, the data stream on each line is separately phase aligned with the clock, and bit aligned.