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connectivityZONE Products for the week of December 10, 2007
IDT Corporation Says…
IDT Extends PCI Express Gen 2 Leadership with Four New Switch Solutions
Proven IDT technology and interoperability helping to accelerate PCIe Gen2 adoption in the volume and value server markets
IDT continues to extend its Gen2 PCI Express (PCIe) switch leadership position with the ongoing development and delivery of high-performing devices. IDT has introduced four new PCIe switching solutions optimized to address the I/O connectivity challenges faced in the volume and value server markets. Specifically, the new IDT PCI Express Gen2 devices provide industry-leading performance-per-watt and lowest total power consumption critical for server markets. Moreover, the devices enable the cost-effective development of new systems by simplifying board layout, reducing system design and manufacturing cost, thus speeding time to market.
The four new PCIe Gen2 switching solutions -- a 24-lane, 6-port; a 24-lane, 3-port; a 6-lane, 6-port; and a 4-lane, 4-port join the company’s existing portfolio of PCIe Gen2 switches,as announced in May 2007 (see http://idt.com/?id=4275), which are now shipping in volume.
“Intel applauds IDT for bringing PCI Express 2.0 technology switching solutions to market that support our next generation server, workstation, and storage platforms,” said Hemant Dhulla, general manager of Intel’s server chipsets strategy. “Tapping the full performance potential of Intel’s Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors requires increasing I/O bandwidth at the system level, and we expect that IDT switching solutions will help systems designers achieve new levels of I/O performance to support our processors.”
The IDT Gen2 PCIe switches are fully compliant with the PCI-SIG PCIe base specification 2.0 and provide customers the option of doubling the throughput bandwidth of existing PCIe lanes to 5 gigabits per second of data transfer for cutting edge designs or allowing a 50 percent reduction in the number of PCIe lanes and board traces necessary to support link throughput requirements for a more cost effective design.
“We are very enthusiastic about our market momentum for PCIe Gen2 products. We have shipped significant quantities of our first Gen2 products to several Tier-1 Server OEMs and we are actively working with these and other customers on additional designs, providing samples, system development kits and technical support,” said Mario Montana, VP and GM of the IDT serial switching division. “IDT continues to lead the transition to Gen2 technology and we are pleased to be providing our customers and partners with proven, quality switching solutions to accelerate the adoption of PCIe Gen2 interconnect technology.”
The newest IDT PCIe switches deliver the industry’s best performance-per-watt and provide features optimized for the volume and value server segments. The solutions demonstrate the IDT corporate initiative to provide devices that are “power smart” by incorporating advanced features to minimize power consumption, maximize performance-per-watt and reduce total cost of ownership and thermal design complexity. These new additions to the industry’s broadest portfolio of PCIe Gen2 solutions decrease time-to-market and reduce system validation testing by utilizing the proven IDT switch and interface technology employed in the existing family of IDT PCIe Gen2 switches.
“As Broadcom continues to drive enterprise Ethernet solutions, we have worked closely with IDT to reduce our customers’ product development time and establish interoperability between Broadcom’s PCIe Gen2 Ethernet products and IDT’s PCIe Gen2 switches,” said Vinod Lakhani, Senior Director and General Manager of Broadcom’s High-Speed Controllers line of business. "We’re pleased to see IDT leading with PCIe Gen2 switching solutions and aggressively providing platforms for interoperability testing of current and future system I/O devices.”
“AMD’s graphics cards pair perfectly and have demonstrated successful interoperability with the IDT PCIe 2.0 switch chips,” said Victor Peng, VP of Design Engineering, AMD Graphics Products Group. “The ATI Radeon HD 2600 series of products can take advantage of the performance boost of PCIe Gen2 which effectively doubles the link bandwidth. We are pleased to be a part of enabling standards for the industry that delivers leading-edge technology to our customers.”
Each of the IDT PCIe switching solutions has a dedicated evaluation and development kit for device testing and analysis, and system emulation. Each kit consists of a hardware evaluation board with representative upstream and downstream connectivity, and an IDT-developed, GUI-based software environment that enables the designer to tune system and device configurations to meet system requirements. Moreover, to ensure that each OEM system design is optimized for production and meets its time to market objectives, IDT provides customers with extensive, collaborative technical support including system modeling and signal integrity analyses, and schematic and layout review services.
EN-Genius Says…
IDT’s crop of Gen2 PCIe switches reflects the company’s market strategy that avoids selling commodity me-too products whenever possible, even when it’s something as generic as a PCI Express switch. Instead of coming up with the usual Swiss Army Knife-like feature sets one is accustomed to seeing in early products, the family focuses on the things that high-performance servers (the earliest high-volume adopters of Gen2 PCIe) will need as they shift to the faster bus speeds. In this case, IDT’s market-tuning efforts resulted in the inclusion of several important features to enhance interoperability and performance as well as several things they did not include to aggressively trim price and power.
The release above hints at how the switch family was designed with a major emphasis on energy efficiency and power management capabilities but it barely mentions the pains that IDT went to in order to assure their parts would reliably interoperate with parts from other vendors under even marginal conditions. For example, the programmable L1 entry rejection timer allows them to work with marginally-compliant end points whose optional functions may or may not work as reliably as they should. IDT was also very careful to build in generous timing margins to accommodate some point devices which may have marginal compliance with the Gen2 spec, especially at the edge of their temperature or voltage ranges. They’ve worked closely with major vendors like AMD, Broadcom, Intel to ensure there are no surprises with any of their upcoming Gen2 products. IDT also paid close attention to the fact that, at least for the next few years, some of their parts will also be talking to slower PCIe 1.0/1.1 devices which may have some small compatibility issues with their link training state machines.
Some of the switch family power savings is achieved using the same fine-grained clock gating techniques that their Gen1 devices employ to clock only the logic elements that are actually being used for a particular operation (see the December 2006 GenI review for details.) and by allowing a user to turn off any unused SerDes lanes (not just tri-stated, as some switches do).
They’ve also kept power consumption (and silicon cost) down by stripping many of the fancy features (redundant upstream support, multiple virtual channels, dual or multicasting and non-transparent bridging) that early applications in high-performance servers make use of anyway. I was surprised to see that they’d cut out the non-transparent bridging capabilities, but IDT says that, at least in most Intel-based servers, coherency and multiple masters are handled within the CPU cluster at or near the North Bridge region.
Despite these economy measures, the switch feature set still retains several important capabilities that IDT feels are essential for server applications including support for the autonomous link reliability management option in the Gen2 spec. This allows a switch or end point port to detect link errors and downshift the SerDes lanes to the original PCIe clock rate (2.5 GHz) if necessary.
Further power savings are realized in many applications by invoking the PCIe specification’s optional low-swing voltage mode which cuts the transmitter voltage swing in half and disables the de-emphasis circuit. In most on-board lane runs (and even some backplane connections) where the transmitter does not have to push against lossy channel characteristics, using the low-voltage swing option can save around 20% over a standard SerDes transmitter. If you are moving the PCIe signals across backplanes or other challenging environments, the SerDes on-the-fly programmable margining capability will certainly come in handy. It allows a user to fine-tune pre- and de-emphasis levels during operation to accommodate changes in loading and signal levels as different peripherals are attached in blade servers or other modular designs.
More aggressive (and adventurous) designers can save even more power using the optional in-band signaling feature provided by the Gen2 spec to invoke a programmable and dynamic link width reconfiguration function. This allows the switch and an end point to turn individual SerDes lanes, within a particular link, on or off to accommodate varying traffic levels. Using dynamic link width is a great way to trim power consumption by keeping one or two lanes active most of the time and only kicking on the rest to accommodate intermittent bursts of heavy traffic.
Each of IDT’s new Gen2 PCIe devices is available in a 19 mm flip chip BGA package with 1 mm ball spacing. Volume pricing for the 24-lane, 6-port 89PES24T6G2 is $49; for the 24-lane, 3-port 89PES24T3G2 $44.80; $9.70 for the 6-lane, 6-port 89PES6T6G2; and $8.90 for the 4-lane, 4-port 89PES4T4G2. All will begin general sampling in January, 2008.
Data Sheet 89HPES24T6G2
Data Sheet 89HPES24T3G2
Data Sheet 89HPES6T6G2
Data Sheet 89PHES4T4G2
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