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serdes .... it's serdes all the way down ....

There's a growing trend in SoCs of just having serdes blocks - because these days PCIe, high speed ether, USB/thunderthing, sata etc etc are all just variants on the same high-speed technology - different protocols are just different MACs on top of a common serdes block

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Interesting, can anyone point out some SOCs with multiple serdes? As an interested, non embedded developer, I know high end fpga do, but I'm not aware of any SOCs.

Also how hard is it to layout pcb for these? Is length matching sufficient?

Length matching with a ground plane on the layer below will get you to USB 3.0 or PCIe 2.0 maybe. Maybe higher speeds need special PCB surfaces? Vias embedded in BGA lands? Not sure. Probably also would want to do simulation of the EMF for all the traces on the board, and software for that is "email us for a quote" expensive.

Oh yeah at these speeds everything is a microwave stripline

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