telecommunication Telecommunication is the transmission of information by various types of technologies over wire, radio, optical, or other electromagnetic systems. It has its origin in the desire of humans for communication over a distance greater than that ...

and

data storage Data storage is the recording (storing) of information (data) in a storage medium. Handwriting, phonographic recording, magnetic tape, and optical discs are all examples of storage media. Biological molecules such as RNA and DNA are consi ...

, Manchester code (also known as phase encoding, or PE) is a

line code In telecommunication, a line code is a pattern of voltage, current, or photons used to represent digital data transmitted down a communication channel or written to a storage medium. This repertoire of signals is usually called a constrained ...

in which the encoding of each data bit is either low then high, or high then low, for equal time. It is a self-clocking signal with no

DC component DC, D.C., D/C, Dc, or dc may refer to: Places * Washington, D.C. (District of Columbia), the capital and the federal territory of the United States * Bogotá, Distrito Capital, the capital city of Colombia * Dubai City, as distinct from t ...

. Consequently, electrical connections using a Manchester code are easily galvanically isolated. Manchester code derives its name from its development at the

University of Manchester The University of Manchester is a public university, public research university in Manchester, England. The main campus is south of Manchester city centre, Manchester City Centre on Wilmslow Road, Oxford Road. The university owns and operates majo ...

, where the coding was used for storing data on the magnetic drums of the

Manchester Mark 1 The Manchester Mark 1 was one of the earliest stored-program computers, developed at the Victoria University of Manchester, England from the Manchester Baby (operational in June 1948). Work began in August 1948, and the first version was oper ...

computer. Manchester code was widely used for magnetic recording on 1600 bpi computer tapes before the introduction of 6250 bpi tapes which used the more efficient group-coded recording. Manchester code was used in early Ethernet physical layer standards and is still used in

consumer IR Consumer IR, consumer infrared, or CIR is a class of devices employing the infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum for wireless communications. CIR ports are commonly found in consumer electronics devices such as television remote contr ...

protocols,

RFID Radio-frequency identification (RFID) uses electromagnetic fields to automatically identify and track tags attached to objects. An RFID system consists of a tiny radio transponder, a radio receiver and transmitter. When triggered by an electromag ...

and

near-field communication Near-field communication (NFC) is a set of communication protocols that enables communication between two electronic devices over a distance of 4 cm (1 in) or less. NFC offers a low-speed connection through a simple setup that can be u ...

Features

Manchester coding is a special case of binary phase-shift keying (BPSK), where the data controls the phase of a square wave

carrier Carrier may refer to: Entertainment * ''Carrier'' (album), a 2013 album by The Dodos * ''Carrier'' (board game), a South Pacific World War II board game * ''Carrier'' (TV series), a ten-part documentary miniseries that aired on PBS in April 20 ...

whose frequency is the data rate. Manchester code ensures frequent line voltage transitions, directly proportional to the clock rate; this helps

clock recovery In serial communication of digital data, clock recovery is the process of extracting timing information from a serial data stream itself, allowing the timing of the data in the stream to be accurately determined without separate clock information. ...

. The

of the encoded signal is not dependent on the data and therefore carries no information. Therefore connections may be inductively or capacitively coupled, allowing the signal to be conveyed conveniently by galvanically isolated media (e.g., Ethernet) using a network isolator—a simple one-to-one pulse transformer which cannot convey a DC component. According to

Cisco Cisco Systems, Inc., commonly known as Cisco, is an American-based multinational digital communications technology conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. Cisco develops, manufactures, and sells networking hardware, ...

, "Manchester encoding introduces some difficult frequency-related problems that make it unsuitable for use at higher data rates". There are more complex codes, such as

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 diff ...

, that use less bandwidth to achieve the same data rate but may be less tolerant of frequency errors and

jitter In electronics and telecommunications, jitter is the deviation from true periodicity of a presumably periodic signal, often in relation to a reference clock signal. In clock recovery applications it is called timing jitter. Jitter is a signific ...

in the transmitter and receiver reference clocks.

Encoding and decoding

Manchester code always has a transition at the middle of each bit period and may (depending on the information to be transmitted) have a transition at the start of the period also. The direction of the mid-bit transition indicates the data. Transitions at the period boundaries do not carry information. They exist only to place the signal in the correct state to allow the mid-bit transition.

Conventions for representation of data

There are two opposing conventions for the representations of data. The first of these was first published by G. E. Thomas in 1949 and is followed by numerous authors (e.g., Andy Tanenbaum). It specifies that for a 0 bit the signal levels will be low–high (assuming an amplitude physical encoding of the data) – with a low level in the first half of the bit period, and a high level in the second half. For a 1 bit the signal levels will be high–low. This is also known as Manchester II or Biphase-L code. The second convention is also followed by numerous authors (e.g.,

William Stallings William Stallings is an American author. He has written computer science textbooks on operating systems, computer networks, computer organization, and cryptography. Early life Stallings earned his B.S. in electrical engineering from Universi ...

) as well as by

IEEE 802.4 Token bus is a network implementing a Token Ring protocol over a ''virtual ring'' on a coaxial cable. A token is passed around the network nodes and only the node possessing the token may transmit. If a node doesn't have anything to send, the t ...

(token bus) and lower speed versions of

IEEE 802.3 IEEE 802.3 is a working group and a collection standards defining the physical layer and data link layer's media access control (MAC) of wired Ethernet. The standards are produced by the working group of Institute of Electrical and Electronics ...

(Ethernet) standards. It states that a logic 0 is represented by a high–low signal sequence and a logic 1 is represented by a low–high signal sequence. If a Manchester encoded signal is inverted in communication, it is transformed from one convention to the other. This ambiguity can be overcome by using differential Manchester encoding.

Decoding

The existence of guaranteed transitions allows the signal to be self-clocking, and also allows the receiver to align correctly; the receiver can identify if it is misaligned by half a bit period, as there will no longer always be a transition during each bit period. The price of these benefits is a doubling of the bandwidth requirement compared to simpler NRZ coding schemes.

Encoding

Encoding conventions are as follows: * Each bit is transmitted in a fixed time (the "period"). * A 0 is expressed by a low-to-high transition, a 1 by high-to-low transition (according to G. E. Thomas's convention – in the IEEE 802.3 convention, the reverse is true). * The transitions which signify 0 or 1 occur at the midpoint of a period. * Transitions at the start of a period are overhead and don't signify data.

References