Clever PCI Express-based system interconnect solution

20th March 2007

IDT

ES Admin

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IDT has announced what it says is the industry’s first PCI Express-based (PCIe) system interconnect solution to predictably and efficiently manage all communications throughout the system while providing full-line rate throughput, reliability and high quality of service. The new devices are optimized to meet the capacity, scalability and predictable throughput requirements demanded by bladed system providers for consistent high performance and flexible system resource sharing. This robust solution - which includes the industry’s first 64 lane and 16 port device - enables equipment providers to use PCIe as the primary high performance system interconnect for demanding server, storage, communications and embedded applications.

The seven new PCIe switches broaden the already industry-leading IDT family of PCIe system solutions to a total of seventeen. Three of the new devices are PCIe-based system interconnect switches that manage communications between roots and intelligent endpoints throughout a bladed system. Ranging from an 8-port, 32-lane configuration on the low end to the industry’s largest monolithic PCIe switch with 16 ports and 64 lanes, the IDT switches offer unprecedented levels of switching capacity and system scalability and provide predictable, full-line rate performance for multiple simultaneous traffic flows regardless of system loading. The remaining four devices are new inter-domain PCI Express switches. This new class of switching solutions consists of both two and three port devices that support address translation and non-transparent bridging between PCI Express domains.

The IDT system interconnect solution surpasses simple peer-to-peer switching by offering robust support for communication between multiple roots and providing constructs for I/O virtualization and sharing that leverage today’s PCI Express processors and endpoints.

Like other established IDT PCIe solutions, these devices have been optimized for low power. In fact, this family offers the lowest power consumption per port of any PCIe system switching solution available in the market today, enabling scalable and increasingly dense bladed system architectures and reducing the total cost of ownership by significantly minimizing system thermal management requirements.

All of the new switches have a dedicated evaluation and development kit for device testing and analysis, and system emulation. Each kit consists of a hardware development 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 modelling and signal integrity analyses, and schematic and layout review services.