PLX Technology working with TI to deliver PCI Express-enabled DSPs

SUNNYVALE, USA: PLX Technology Inc., a leader in connectivity solutions for the data center and the home, announced its collaboration with Texas Instruments Inc. (TI) on a solution encompassing TI’s digital signal processors (DSPs) enabled by PCI Express (PCIe) 2.0 standards.

With PCIe’s high performance, low cost and widespread market adoption, the availability of TI DSPs and PLX PCIe connectivity broadens the capabilities of new designs in applications such as wireless infrastructure communications, DSP farms, digital media, test and measurement, medical imaging and industrial automation.

“Enabling PCI Express on our high-performance DSPs plays a key role in our expansion into new markets,” said Manish Patel, multicore media infrastructure marketing manager, TI. “Working together with PLX allows us the flexibility to test and verify functionality between our PCIe DSPs and PLX’s PCIe products, as well as have the resources to provide customers with a vital connectivity option.”

“PLX is pleased to see PCI Express supported by Texas Instruments,” said Krishna Mallampati, director of marketing for PCIe switches, PLX. “The PCI Express ecosystem continues to get stronger every day as new markets embrace it, and new products implementing these DSPs can now more easily communicate through this dominant standard. With a broad portfolio of PCIe switch products, PLX enables TI’s customers to build DSP farms that suit their needs. We look forward to working together with TI to deliver future higher-performance, lower-power solutions.”

PLX offers more than 40 PCIe switches with multiple lane and port configurations, all supported by robust software tools. These solutions include the industry’s largest lane- and port-count switch at 96 lanes and 24 ports, down to a four-lane, four-port switch.

PLX was first to market with PCIe switches in 2004 and has continued to innovate with the industry’s only PCIe Gen3 switch family that is sampling today, offering lane counts ranging from 12 to 48 lanes. Board and system designers can take full advantage of the latest PCIe specification’s bidirectional 8Gbp/s per lane, thus enabling one PLX 48-lane Gen3 switch to handle 96Gbp/s of full peer-to-peer bandwidth.

TI’s new TMS320C66x generation of multicore devices are enhanced with PCIe Gen2. Ideal for applications that demand high performance and low power, the C66x DSPs are built with multiple 1.25 GHz DSP cores and deliver the industry’s first 10-GHz DSP with 320 GMACs and 160 GFLOPs of combined fixed- and floating-point performance on a single device. TI also integrates PCIe into many of its DaVinci digital media processors, C6-Integra DSP+ARM processors and Sitara ARM microprocessors.