PLX announces sampling of industry’s first PCI Express 3.0 switches

SUNNYVALE, USA: PLX Technology, leading global supplier of software-enriched silicon connectivity solutions for the enterprise and consumer markets, today announced it is now sampling the industry’s first PCI Express 3.0 (PCIe Gen 3) switches, thus expanding on its well-established market dominance with new products for performance-starved cloud and data center applications.

Each one of the six new Gen 3 switches is designed to upgrade today’s widely deployed PCIe-based systems, including computing and communications platforms.

The new innovative PLX ExpressLane PCIe Gen 3 switch family, designed on 40nm process node, includes broad lane counts ranging from 12 up to 48 lanes. Board and system designers can take full advantage of the latest PCIe specification – 8 Gbps in both directions (Tx/Rx), per lane – thus enabling one PLX 48-lane Gen 3 switch to handle an astounding 96GBps of full peer-to-peer bandwidth.

PLX’s Gen 3 switches also offer hot-plug controllers and a non-transparent (NT) port feature, which enables the implementation of multi-host systems in communications, storage, and blade server applications.

With an extensive array of performance, efficiency and versatile features, board and system designers can use these industry-first Gen 3 switches to develop a wide variety of PCIe-based applications ranging from chip-to-chip interconnection inside the box to box-to-box backplanes and cabled clusters.

Leading global manufacturers intend to use these switches in enterprise server and storage systems, including SSDs to support cloud computing and IO virtualization needs. In communication applications, designers will use the PCIe 3.0 switches to connect multi-channel 10GE NICs, CNAs, IB adapters and Fibre Channel HBAs to the host.