PLX Expanded PCIe Gen 3 Switches

Published:2011/9/20 2:38:00 Author:Amy From:SeekIC

PLX Technology, Inc. is the technology and market share leader in PCI Express switches, bridges and 10GBase-T PHY solutions, with additional leadership in consumer storage controllers as well as general purpose USB controllers. Recently, it upgraded its PCI Express (PCIe) Gen3 switch family with three new devices compliant with the PCI Express Gen3 r1.0 Specification. The new PLX ExpressLane PEX8749 (48-lanes, 18 ports), PEX8733 (32 lanes, 18-ports) and PEX8725 (24 lanes, 10 ports) PCIe Gen3 switches enable more powerful designs in servers, storage and communications platforms.

Two non-transparency (NT) ports, four direct memory access (DMA) engines, two virtual channels (VCs), and 12 ports for spread spectrum clock (SSC) isolation are integrated into each new PLX PCIe Gen3 multi-root switch device. The NT feature enables host failover and redundancy and has been used by tier-one OEMs. The on-chip DMA engines enable designers to improve the performance of systems. Support for two VCs enable users to prioritize traffic to support desired quality of service (QoS). The SSC clock isolation for each x4 port of the device allows designers to create large systems with each sub-system running its own SSC clock.

With x16 and x8 ports, these switches provide native x2 and x4 ports which enable development of large arrays of SSD based systems with fewer switches. Also included is the support for PCIe specification engineering change notices (ECNs) such as multicast, access control service (ACS), alternative routing-ID interpretation (ARI), atomic operations, and optimized buffer flush/fill (OBFF). PLX PCIe Gen3 devices are backwards-compatible with Gen2/Gen1 devices. The PLX Gen3 devices can be used to create Gen3 slots using their bridging capability.

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