PCIe 5.0 SerDes PHY

The Rambus PCI Express (PCIe) 5.0 and Compute Express Link (CXL) 2.0 PHY is a low-power, area-optimized, silicon IP core designed with a system-oriented approach to maximize flexibility and ease of integration. It delivers up to 32 GT/s signaling rates in performance-intensive applications for artificial intelligence (AI), data center, edge, 5G infrastructure and graphics. With the Rambus PCIe 5.0 controller core, it comprises a complete PCIe 5.0 SerDes subsystem. Alternatively, it is integrated with the Rambus CXL 2.0 controller core for a complete CXL interconnect subsystem.

How the PCIe 5.0 Interface Works

The Rambus PCI Express 5.0 PHY with the PLDA PCIe 5.0 digital controller comprise a high-performance serial link subsystem. Optimized for power in challenging, high-loss channels, our PCIe 5.0 interface solution is ideal for performance-intensive AI, data center, edge, 5G infrastructure and graphics applications. The PHY consists of a PMA hard macro that supports PCIe 5.0, 4.0, 3.0 and 2.0 protocols and a physical coding sublayer (PCS) soft macro for PCIe that is PIPE 5.1 compliant. Integrated with the Rambus PCIe 5.0 digital controller, the PHY alternatively can be paired with 3rd-party PIPE 5.1-compliant controllers.
PCIe 5.0 Interface Subsystem solution
PCIe 5.0 Interface Subsystem Solution

Designed with a minimal set of broadside controls, the PHY is configurable in x2, x4, x8 and x16 lane configurations with bifurcation support. This gives the PHY improved flexibility and support for a wide range of applications. Multi-tap transmitter and adaptive receiver equalization supports more than 36dB of channel insertion loss.

The PCIe 5 SerDes PHY is available on an advanced 7nm FinFET process node.

Data Center Evolution: Accelerating Computing with PCI Express 5.0

Data Center Evolution: Accelerating Computing with PCI Express 5.0

The PCI Express® (PCIe) interface is the critical backbone that moves data at high bandwidth between various compute nodes such as CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, and workload-specific accelerators. The rise of cloud-based computing and hyperscale data centers, along with high-bandwidth applications like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), require the new level of performance of PCI Express 5.0.

Solution Offerings

Protocol Compatibility

Protocol Signaling Rate (GT/s) Application
PCIe 2.0 5 High bandwidth peripherals and graphics
PCIe 3.0 8 Servers, storage, networking devices
PCIe 4.0 16 Servers, storage, networking devices
PCIe 5.0 32 AI, servers, storage, networking, 5G infrastructure
SerDes Signal Integrity Challenges at 28Gbps and Beyond

SerDes Signal Integrity Challenges at 28Gbps and Beyond

Maintaining signal integrity has become increasingly difficult as data rates moves past 28Gbps to 56Gbps and beyond. Up to 28Gbps rates, NRZ is the preferred and standardized encoding scheme which consists of 1’s and 0’s. NRZ is also referred to as PAM2 (pulse amplitude modulation, 2-level), due to its two amplitude levels which contain 1 bit of information in every symbol. With serial data rates hitting 56 Gb/s per channel, signal impairments caused by increased bandwidth has prompted the high-speed serial data industry to adopt PAM4, or 4-level pulse amplitude modulation.

Inventions

Phase Interpolator-Based CDR

Reduces cost, power and area of clock and data recovery (CDR) circuit and improves jitter performance in high-speed parallel and serial links versus PLL-based CDRs.
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