The goal of this paper is to provide the reader with a brief overview of the basic building blocks within a high-speed serial transceiver, to provide an outline of the major interconnect standards utilizing the highspeed serial U0 circuitiy and to give the basics behind the design techniques required to successfulb design and implement a flpical niulti-GHz serial U0 device.Several major design obstacles will be presented followed by a discussioii of the potential design techniques that may be used to avercome such implementafiori issues. The paper will cover hvo main de.sign approaches: low swing differential signaling and multilevel signaling.