connectivityZONE Products for the week of January 16, 2006
PLX Technology Says…
PLX's Latest PCI Express Bridge Enables Easy Upgrade For Industry Standard Local-Bus Designs
PEX 8311 Provides Designs with Smooth Upgrade from PCI to
PCI Express
PLX Technology, Inc. has announced the PEX 8311, the industry's
only bridging device dedicated to upgrading standard processor, DSP, and
FPGA bus interface designs to PCIe. The newest member of the PLX ExpressLane
family of PCIe switches and bridges, the feature-rich PEX 8311 provides
the power and flexibility of PCIe to embedded designs spanning the video,
imaging, communications, and industrial-control markets.
The PEX 8311 provides an efficient conversion between a parallel, low-overhead local bus and the serial, packet-based PCIe inter-connect, allowing users to add a scalable, high-bandwidth interconnect to a wide variety of root complex- or endpoint-based applications. These applications include:
The PEX 8311's direct-memory-access (DMA) capability improves the performance of these applications; the DMA offloads from the host CPU the burdensome computational tasks required for transferring data between the PCIe port and the CPU- independent Local Bus standard used in many processor, DSP, and FPGA designs. Such local bus designs allow glue-less data connections between these devices and the PEX 8311.
"With the PEX 8311, PLX is empowering designers to quickly enter the PCI Express market with an economical solution to adapt existing designs to this rapidly growing interconnect technology, while simplifying the process of blending it with the wide range of FPGAs, DSPs and CPUs designers are now using," said John Gudmundson, senior product marketing manager at PLX. "This market is especially attractive to designers and manufacturers at a time when industry experts predict PCI Express designs will grow to hundreds of millions of units in coming years."
Cost-Efficient, Additional Features, Ease of Design, Interoperability
The PEX 8311 provides a cost-effective, off-the-shelf alternative to programmable solutions; using the device to bridge between PCIe and a local bus can save up to 50 percent of the cost of programmable solutions, with no IP expenses or added design time. Additionally, the PEX 8311 delivers features not found in IP for programmable devices, such as two independent data-transfer channels for simultaneous bidirectional traffic, simultaneous Direct Master and Direct Slave modes, four general-purpose I/Os to program/control other system ICs, a read-ahead mode and zero-wait-state bursts for high throughput, and integrated SerDes physical-layer (PHY) interfaces that eliminate the need for a separate PHY device.
The PEX 8311 provides a complete local-bus-to-PCIe interface, including address translation, packet generation and decode, Message Signaled Interrupt support, and parallel to serial conversion. It features a 66MHz local bus that can be configured in 8-, 16- or 32-bit widths. Additionally, the bridge features one PCIe lane with a bi-directional bandwidth of 2.5 Gbits/s.The Hot Plug-compatible PEX 8311 features 3.3v- and 5v-tolerant I/Os, and its PCIe port is PCI Express Base Specification R1.0a-compliant.
The PEX 8311 is register-compatible with the PLX PCI 9xxx series of PCI-to-local-bus bridges, enabling designers to quickly upgrade to PCIe technology existing designs based on the widely used PCI 9xxx platform. The PEX 8311 also is fully interoperable with PLX's other ExpressLane devices. This assures designers that the bridge will operate in systems also using such ExpressLane devices as the PEX 8111 and PEX 8114 bridges, and PEX 8508, PEX 8518, PEX 8524, and PEX 8532 switches.
Compatibility Conserves Software Investment, Development Tools Speed Designs
The PEX 8311, as with all members of the ExpressLane family, features software compatibility with designs based on conventional PCI, enabling designers to leverage the investment they've already made in software.
The bridge is also supported by PLX's Rapid Development Kit (RDK) line of tools; the PEX 8311RDK includes a proven, working hardware platform incorporating the PEX 8311, a complete set of board schematics, symbols, and layout files for hardware design. The kit also features an extensive software development kit that includes a graphical utility for access to chip registers, sample drivers and a support library for Microsoft Windows and Linux operating systems.
This PCI software compatibility and the PEX 8311RDK combine to help lower
overall development costs and considerably improve manufacturers' time to
market with new and migrated designs.
analogZONE Says . . .
For the many designers who toil in the embedded
computing market, PLX's versatile local-bus/PCIe bridge will be a welcome
and, more than likely, an often-used component. PLX's informative press
release above does an unusually good job of explaining the PEX 8311's functions
and features so I'll just point out a few things of special note here. For
one thing I really appreciate how PLX added so much versatility without
adding too much to the price. Its local bus can be configured between 8
and 32 bit, and to support both root complex- and endpoint-based applications.
Its ability to support a read-ahead mode and zero-wait-state bursts as well
as hardware based control signals will also make for faster, more efficient
data transfers in applications where both speed and low latency are important
issues.
While PLX has some respectable competition for regular PCI/PCIe bridges from IDT, TI, and others, embedded designers working with standard local bus technologies have not had a convenient way to work with the many PCIe-based peripheral chips that are hitting the market. The PEX 8311 will make these folk's lives easier by enabling both legacy systems and new non-PC-derived designs to enjoy easy access to the latest graphics controllers, storage controllers, and other low-cost peripheral devices. And if you're building an embedded board, which uses a PCIe connection to its host system, this chip will definitely make your life easier.
The PEX 8311 is sampling in a Pb-free BGA-337 priced under $25 in volume. Production is expected in March 2006. A development kit is also available.
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