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connectivityZONE Products for the week of March 16, 2009
Gennum Corporation Says…
Broadened Offerings for PCI Express Gen-1/2/3-based Embedded Applications
PCIe re-driver, bridge solutions deliver up to 2x performance over existing solutions for embedded communications
Expanding its high-performance PCI Express (PCIe) solutions and design platforms, Gennum Corporation has unveiled two new PCIe products aimed at enabling high-speed embedded applications. The GN1407 quad channel re-driver and the GN4121 local bus bridge bring high-performance solutions—up to 2X that of competing solutions—to PCIe designers, providing more options as this high-performance interconnect increasingly migrates to embedded communications for servers, storage, broadcast video, industrial control, medical and commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) applications.
“In the face of rising performance requirements in embedded applications, Gennum continues to broaden its offerings to deliver high-performance, easy-to-use solutions that enable designers to extend PCIe from traditional PCs into embedded applications,” said Bharat Tailor, Director of Marketing, Networking, Storage and Computing for Gennum. “By giving our customers more performance options at various price points that can scale with their application needs, they are able to select the ideal solution for their embedded applications. Indeed, with these scalable solutions, our customers are developing exciting new PCIe applications such as medical equipment and machine vision, along with traditional high-speed networking and broadcast systems.”
The new offerings join Gennum’s growing family of high-performance PCIe solutions and are pin compatible with Gennum’s GN1406, the industry’s first re-driver solution to integrate a clock and data recovery (CDR) capability, and the GN4124 PCIe bridge solution, the industry’s first four lane PCIe to local bus solution. Gennum’s new GN1407 re-driver solution is ideal for applications where retiming functionality may not be required, specifically relatively short, well behaved channels, such as controlled impedance backplane interconnect, and PCIe cable interconnect. Moreover, the GN1407 is both PCIe 2.0 and PCIe 3.0 data rate-capable, supporting up to 8 gigabits per second (Gb/s), allowing users to “future proof” designs.
Gennum’s new GN4121 now provides a single lane option for designers so that even single lane PCIe applications can benefit from the ease of use and time to market advantages that characterize all of Gennum’s PCIe solutions. Applications such as PC- 104 Express IO cards, multi-media streaming and audio capture will benefit from a single lane solution, where existing FPGA-only solutions are expensive and require purchasing IP cores.
PCIe Continues Rapid Expansion into Embedded Applications
“PCIe is one of the bright spots we see during this difficult economy, with good growth in PCIe interconnect and peripheral products expected over the next five years,” said Jag Bolaria, senior analyst, The Linley Group. “Manufacturers are anxious to bring new PCIe applications to market, such as DSP acceleration cards, high definition (HD) video capture and data acquisition cards, all of which we expect will migrate rapidly to PCIe over the next 24 months. With its new high-performance, low-cost solutions, Gennum can enable this migration and is therefore well positioned to capture a large share of these fast-growing markets.”
GN1407 Enables Engineers to Ensure High-performance PCIe Interconnect
The GN1407 re-driver compensates for transmission loss that can occur at high data rates, maintaining PCIe 2.0 and PCIe 3.0 signal integrity over 40 inch FR4 trace and 7 meters 24 AWG twinaxial cables. A quad channel equalizer re-driver designed for 1.25 Gbits/s to 8 Gbits/s communication, the GN1407 delivers 19 programmable equalization settings from 0 to 24dB, more than twice the capability of competing solutions. The small footprint of the GN1407 enables designers to use it in cost-sensitive applications such as servers, storage area networking equipment, and serial backplane connectivity for communications infrastructure equipment. The device also supports OOB (out-of-band) signaling for SAS and SATA applications, such as storage and PC networks for connecting to external disk drives.
Delivering, high-speed data transmission up to 8 Gbits/sat low power within acceptable error tolerances is a critical industry requirement. By having the PCIe 3.0 performance, designers can now develop their next generation systems based on PCIe 3.0 architecture, using the GN1407. At 70mW per channel power consumption, the GN1407 is a compelling low power solution compared to that of 100mW from competitors. As important, the GN1407’s high gain and significant flexibility delivers signal integrity margin so designers can address inter-system and intra-system interconnect for card-to-card, backplane and chassis-to-chassis connectivity.
GN1407 also provides the highest level (255 programmable settings of 0 to 1250mVpp in steps of ~5mVpp) of built in output swing controls to obtain desired eye opening at the Rx point. The GN1407 meets the PCI-SIG compliance requirements for a receiver. The high gain input equalizer compensates for large PCB trace or cable losses and provides a low jitter, high amplitude signal for down stream devices.
GN4121 Delivers Single-lane Local Bus Bridge Functionality, Eases Migration to PCIe
Enabling designers to easily adopt PCIe, Gennum’s new GN4121 offers a single lane bridge solution for PCIe applications. Incorporating the PCIe physical layer and digital controller on-chip, the new GN4121 eliminates the need for this functionality to be integrated into a standalone, complex and expensive FPGA. This means designers gain access to a full-featured solution, with a typical 50 percent cost savings and a reduction in time to market by up to 80 percent. The single-lane GN4121 provides a lower bandwidth, lower cost option that is ideal for applications such as communications, industrial control, data acquisition, and video and audio streaming. Having achieved compliance with the PCI-Special Interest Group (SIG), Gennum’s GN4121 bridging solution provides a low-risk path to PCI Express development. At the same time, the devices overcome the performance, power, and area drawbacks associated with legacy PCI bridges, and eliminate the need for large FPGAs and external PHYs which are often too power hungry, expensive or time consuming to design.
EN-Genius Says…
Gennum’s mixed-signal expertise and its ability to understand what designers really need has yielded up another pair of superb parts that will help make the life of anyone developing embedded PCI Express applications easier. By offering a single-lane version of their four-lane Local Bus-to-PCIe bridge, they’ve helped made it possible for FPGA-based designs to address a whole new range of low-cost embedded applications. Meanwhile, their simplified quad-lane PCIe redriver can help extend the reach of your I/O runs without the additional power and expense of a full CDR-equipped device. And, if you are willing to pay a little extra attention to your design, it will allow your motherboard or backplane to be ready to support third-generation, 8 Gbit/s PCIe components when they become available.
 There’s not much to say about the GN1407 redriver other than how nice it is to have such powerful equalization capabilities at one’s disposal at such a reasonable price. Although it will not do the retiming functions required for more difficult channel conditions, it should add enough reach and signal integrity to make most designs more robust and less susceptible to the degradation that occurs due to aging or normal PCB production variations. Since it’s pin-compatible with their more-capable GN4106 redriver/retimer, I suspect that designers will be able to help their companies enjoy some cost savings in existing designs with judicious substitutions of the GN4107 where its redriver-only capabilities prove sufficient.
Gennum’s GN4121 single-lane Local Bus bridge uses the same basic architecture as its four-lane cousin, the GN4124, which I reviewed in great depth back in August of 2008. The reason the GN4121 is noteworthy is because it continues to push down the entry cost point for adding PCIe to FPGA-based designs so that industrial and medical equipment can start to take advantage of the growing collection of processors and peripherals that now support the interface. As the release above says, one of the most appealing applications for FPGAs is implementing specialized DSP algorithms but I can also imagine using an FPGA as an inexpensive controller/bridge to analog I/O and other real-world interfaces.
As I mentioned in my earlier review, Lattice and Altera both introduced their own PCIe-capable FPGAs, and the recent arrival of more low-cost SerDes-equipped FPGAs from Xilinx starts to narrow Gennum’s price advantage. Nevertheless, I think that it’s still less expensive to mate a non-SerDes Xilix Spartan 3a or an Altera Cyclone device to a GN4121 than an integrated solution. I’d also venture that the buffering, high-quality transceivers and FPGA loader capabilities that the bridge brings to the game may also bring more value to your design at no additional cost.
The GN1407 is expected to be priced at $7.50 per unit for quantities of 10,000 and is currently sampling with full production slated for Q2 2009. Reference design kits for the GN1407 are available now.
The GN4121 is expected to be priced at $13.50 per unit for quantities of 10,000 and is currently sampling with full production slated for Q2 2009. A complete reference design is available that includes Gerber files, a bill of materials, and software drivers.
GN1407 Product Page
GN4121 Product Page
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