IDT PCI Express Gen2 switches with integrated temperature sensor

SAN JOSE, USA: IDT (Integrated Device Technology Inc.), a leading provider of essential mixed signal semiconductor solutions that enrich the digital media experience, announced new additions to its family of PCI Express (PCIe) Gen2 switching solutions.

These provide high performance, line rate throughput and integrate IDT Power Smart technology to solve system-level thermal management challenges in enterprise applications leveraging high-performance networking and storage controllers including 10 gigabit Ethernet and 8 gigabit Fibre Channel devices.

Based on IDT proprietary and industry-leading, low-power design techniques, the new devices are the first PCIe interconnect solutions to integrate a temperature sensor. The addition of a temperature sensor provides IDT customers with the critical system-level thermal data necessary to enable optimized power management, load balancing and mitigation of potential thermal-related faults and outages.

The three new devices -— a 10-lane, 4-port switch, 12-lane, 3-port switch and 16-lane, 4-port switch —- provide high-performance PCIe Gen2 connectivity, and integrate power saving and thermal management features.

Employing key power management extensions to the PCI Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG) PCI Express Base 2.0, the new switches decrease or eliminate thermal management devices and airflow requirements reducing overall system cost and improving time to market through reduced thermal engineering cycles.

Further, the integration of temperature sensing functionality enables the devices to provide localized thermal feedback for global system management. Applications of the temperature sensor allow for monitoring of the thermal conditions of the switch to provide feedback on the relative health or loading of the connected system elements enabling intervention to shift traffic patterns for better system resource utilization and to avert any potential thermally induced failures.

Additionally, the inclusion of temperature sensor technology offers IDT customers key system development and debug functionality.

“With system I/O speeds and density of systems continuing to rise as the enterprise aggressively migrates to 10GE and 8G Fibre Channel and beyond, thermal management considerations have risen significantly in priority,” said Mario Montana, vice president and general manager of the IDT Enterprise Computing Division.

“We worked closely with our customers who manufacture and procure NICs and HBAs to understand their needs and are pleased to deliver a unique solution that fuses organically developed analog technology for temperature sensing to our industry-leading family of PCIe connectivity solutions.”

The new devices are currently sampling and have 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.