Synchronous Transmission
USART chips have both synchronous and asynchronous modes. In synchronous transmission, the clock data is recovered separately from the data stream and no start/stop bits are used. This improves the efficiency of transmission on suitable channels since more of the bits sent are usable data and not character framing. An asynchronous transmission sends no characters over the interconnection when the transmitting device has nothing to send; but a synchronous interface must send "pad" characters to maintain synchronization between the receiver and transmitter. The usual filler is the ASCII "SYN" character. This may be done automatically by the transmitting device.
Read more about this topic: Universal Asynchronous Receiver/transmitter