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connectivityZONE Products for the week of April 11, 2005
Philips Electronics & Xilinx Say…
Express Delivery: Philips & Xilinx Deliver World's
First Low-Cost Programmable PCI Express Solution
Royal Philips Electronics and Xilinx, Inc. have demonstrated
the world's first programmable PCI Express endpoint silicon solution that
costs less than $15.00 USD (in high volumes). Leveraging expertise in third-generation
PCI semiconductor technology, the Philips-Xilinx programmable PCI Express
solution is offered at a significantly reduced cost than traditional solutions.
PCI Express is a high-speed, point-to-point serial connection that offers a 2.5 to 80 Gigabit transfer rate. It has a dedicated link to each device instead of a shared bus, and delivers advanced features with scalable performance that gives manufacturers the flexibility needed to quickly bring PC, peripheral and consumer electronic products to market.
Comprised of the Philips PX1011A PCI Express PHY and a Xilinx Spartan 3-based FPGA with an optimised Xilinx PCI Express LogiCORE IP core, the flexible Philips-Xilinx PCI Express offering can be used in many high-volume applications including add-in cards, host bus adapters, graphics cards and high-end servers. The PCI Express solution is also packaged in a low-profile form factor, supporting ExpressCard technology applications for space-constrained modular expansion platforms, and it is fully compliant to the PCI Express 1.0a specification.
"The Philips-Xilinx programmable PCI Express solution is making it possible to develop a cost-effective, PCI Express compliant digital I/O card in half the time," said Keith Odom, director, Engineering Architecture and Technology, National Instruments. "Further, the programmable flexibility affords National Instruments to use this solution in multiple product offerings, helping us greatly reduce our inventory costs."
"This new PCI Express solution draws on the expertise of two industry leaders that enables manufacturers to bring a wide variety of video and audio applications to consumers everywhere," said Paul Marino, general manager and vice president, Business Line Connectivity, Philips Semiconductors. "Working with Xilinx, we offer a flexible, two-chip solution to customers who are looking to take full advantage of the simple, fast connection applications PCI Express will bring to the connected consumer."
Flexible Solution at Competitive Price Points
According to Electronic Trend Publications (ETP), the number of PCI Express
ports is expected to exceed 2 billion in 2008. "The industry leaders
are pricing their PCI Express offerings quite low, responding to market
demand for PCI Express based product offerings," said Steve Berry,
principal analyst, ETP. "The aggressive pricing of the Philips-Xilinx
PCI-Express solution will help accelerate the adoption of this interface
in many different high-volume applications by providing a flexible solution
at competitive price points compared to fixed devices."
About the Programmable PCI Express Solution
This robust solution includes the Philips PCI Express PHY that delivers
the SERDES serializer / deserializer and the Physical Coding Sub-Layer (PCS)
and offers excellent bit rate performance. The Philips PHY consumes little
power and features a small form factor that makes it ideal for ExpressCard
applications. The Xilinx 90nm Spartan-3 FPGA part of the solution features
an industry-leading combination of block and distributed RAM, up to 784
I/Os, MicroBlaze 32-bit RISC soft processors and XtremeDSP functionality
with dedicated 18x18 multipliers that deliver up to 330 billion multiply
and accumulates (MACs) per second.
"It was an easy decision to work with Philips, an industry leader
with a proven, fully compliant PCI Express solution. This joint effort gives
our respective customers immediate access to a low-risk solution that has
demonstrated successful interoperability regarding a wide variety of PCI
Express based devices," said Mark Aaldering, vice president, IP Solutions
and Embedded Processing Division at Xilinx.
analogZONE Says . . .
Editor's Note: Before I begin my review, I'd like to note that if you're still a bit unfamiliar with PCI Express, Xilinx has prepared an informative group of materials that are available to help you get up to speed.
Even though both the Philips PX1011A-EL PHY-layer transceiver and the Xilinx FPGAs that form the silicon components of this joint effort have been on the market for some time now, this 2-chip solution for implementing a programmable PCI Express (PCI-E) interface is a very exciting development for almost anyone working with PCI Express-based designs. The big news here is the core IP and reference design that enables several members of Xilinx's Spartan 3 family of FPGAs to interface directly to the Philips PHY and handle the PCI-E endpoint protocol, including the MAC, transaction layer, and configuration management module. The result is a very cost-effective way to quickly implement PCI-E in their designs.
At first, I was skeptical of the $15 (higher in lower volumes) cost because of the price sensitivity in many of the markets (consumer, and PC peripherals among others). But when I learned that the core IP used to implement the PCI-E functionality takes up only a fraction of even a modest-sized FPGA, I realized that the much of the cost would be offset by replacing other chips in a design with the remaining programmable logic. For example, the entire PCI-E solution uses only 25% of the 1.5 M gates available Xilinx's low-cost XC3S1200E device. While possibly not suitable for extremely high volume applications once application-specific one-chip solutions start to hit the market, this pairing does a great job at filling the gap between what's needed and the specialized PCI-E silicon already available that's specifically designed for PCs and game/graphics applications.
Another advantage of going with this solution is that you won't have to worry about performance margins. The Philips PHY leverages their expertise in high-performance analog on CMOS and enjoys a wide performance margin above the PCI-E spec. It also meets or exceeds the PCI-SIG #40, "gold" electrical tests for the PCI-E v1.08 spec, and has successfully met the anticipated requirements for the v1.1 spec (scheduled for approval mid-2005) which has much tighter requirements for jitter, generation, and propagation. And the PHY's proven interoperability with much commercial silicon including NVIDIA Intel, ATI, Via Tech, and NEC, should help you sleep easier tonight.
The interface between the Philips and Xilinx parts is accomplished via a PXPIPE connection, a variant of the PIPE serial interface developed by Intel. Philips has added a Tx clock for timing transfers from the MAC to the PHY instead of relying on the Rx clock to time transfers in both directions. The two-way clocking offers tighter timing which allows use of a narrow 8-bit, 250 MHz bus to keep board space and costs down. Implementing your design elements on the Xilinx FPGA should be relatively straightforward since connecting the PCI-E port to other on-chip logical blocks is done using Xilinx's standard 32-bit on-chip interconnect. scheme.
This off-the shelf solution should help you reduce the time and expense of adding a PCI-E interface to your design, while providing a platform for implementing some, or all, of the other functions you want to put into a printer, camera, or other embedded system. And you should have plenty of room for your own IP since the PCI-E elements occupy only 5K LUTs on the FPGA, and five of its BlockRAM elements.
If your development schedule requires it, you'll be able to hop on the PCI-E bandwagon as early as June when a full reference design becomes available, including Gerber plots, design guidelines, and a four-layer PCB implementation for lowest cost. The design will accommodate several different sized Spartan 3 FPGAs to allow customer to size their solution to their needs.
The Philips PX1011A-EL1 PCI Express PHY will sample in April 2005 with production in June 2005 and is priced lower than $5.50 in high volumes. The Xilinx XC3S1200E device with 1.2 million system gates is available for under $9.00 in 500k volumes.
Philips Product Page
Xilinx
IP Page
Xilinx
Spartan-3E Page
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