Bitstream

Poll without page-refresh

Article on other languages:

	del.icio.us
	Digg
	Furl
	Reddit
	Rojo
	Add to OnlyWire

For other uses of this term, see Bitstream (disambiguation).

This article does not cite any references or sources.
Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed. (June 2007)

A bitstream or bit stream is a time series of bits.

A bytestream is a series of bytes, typically of 8 bits each, and can be regarded as a special case of a bitstream.

Bitstreams are used extensively in telecommunications and computing: for example, the SDH communications technology transports synchronous bitstreams, and the TCP communications protocol transports a bytestream without synchronous timing.

When a bitstream is captured and stored in a computer storage medium, a computer file is created.

The term bitstream is frequently used to describe the configuration data to be loaded into a field programmable gate array (FPGA). This usage may have originated based on the common method of configuring the FPGA from a serial bit stream, typically from a serial PROM or flash memory chip, although most FPGAs also support a byte-parallel loading method as well. The detailed format of the bitstream for a particular FPGA chip is usually considered proprietary to the FPGA vendor.

Bitstream

See also