Lock a clock to a 8B10B data stream?

I merely referred you to the SDI example to illustrate the use of a PFD to lock on external clock to a CDR clock. I did not mean to insinuate that you use a transceiver in SDI mode (even the SDI example doesn't use the transceiver in SDI mode).

The principle remains, you need to find some way to lock the external clock to the CDR clock. I have absolutely no experience with GIGE. From what you're saying it sounds like you don't really get a CDR clock from the receiver. Is that true?

If so, it seems to me what you'll have to do is actually derive a timing signal from the data rate. This is similar to the way we lock the reference clock in the video world. We use the horizontal sync signal (basically the line rate of the video) and we lock the reference clock using that information. It's very low frequency (about 33.5kHz) compared to the actual clock rate (148.5MHz).

Jake