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PLX PCI Express Gen 3 silicon to demo

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CIOL Bureau
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SAN JOSE: PLX Technology has said it has working PCI Express Gen 3 silicon which it will demo for key customers before the end of March 2010.

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The company said in a statement that it intends to sample an array of PCIe Gen 3 switches made in 40nm process technology before the end of 2010 – and starting with server and storage switches sampling before July 2010.

PLX Technology said it is planning to deliver chips for the 8 GigaTransfer/second specification, targeted for use in server and storage backplanes, cabled I/O links as well as computer clusters.

The devices use SerDes with decision feedback equalisation. The PCI Special Interest group had, at its annual meeting held in July 2009, announced it will formally release the specification in June 2010. In June 2009, Gennum Corporation had said it had working silicon cores for the PCIe Gen 3 and had signed out PLX Technology as its first customer. Synopsys had said earlier that it expected to ship similar cores before the end of 2009.

According to Mike Krause, a specialist in interconnect at the PC server group of Hewlett-Packard and a long-time member of the PCI SIG, several vendors today have test-silicon and are evaluating it for compliance with the specification. Some vendors, Mike Krause said, will sample components in the second half of 2010, with chips in production in early 2011. The number of systems using the fast interconnect will go up in 2011 and 2012.

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