IDT extends leadership in PCI Express Gen2 system interconnect solutions

SAN JOSE, USA: IDT (Integrated Device Technology Inc.), a leading provider of essential mixed signal semiconductor solutions that enrich the digital media experience, announced a family of PCI Express (PCIe) Gen2 system interconnect switching solutions featuring the industry’s most-advanced switch architecture to support multi-domain data and control plane connectivity for multi-root communications and embedded applications.

These new PCIe Gen2 solutions provide system architects with unprecedented levels of design flexibility for their multi-root systems, helping IDT customers improve their time to market.

The new switching solutions, based on the IDT partitionable switch architecture, achieve this flexibility by allowing multiple PCIe domains and root complexes to be supported by a single monolithic device that enables dynamic assignment of PCIe slot and I/O peripherals for on-the-fly resource sharing and load balancing. Additionally, the new IDT architecture supports an unprecedented eight non-transparent bridging (NTB) functions to enable root complex isolation, failover support and inter-processor communication between PCIe domains.

This architecture also leverages the rich IDT silicon timing heritage to integrate the industry’s only PCIe switching solution providing multiple clock domain isolation, including support for multiple spread spectrum clocking (SSC) timing domains. With additional unique feature differentiation, including multicast capability within and across domains, two Direct Memory Access (DMA) functions and support for PCI eXtensions for Instrumentation (PXIe), the new IDT switch family provides unmatched support for multi-root communications in embedded systems.

The new family is comprised of seven devices with system interconnect solutions targeting data- and services-plane traffic as well as control-plane traffic. Solutions for high-performance data traffic include a 32-lane and 8-port device, and a 24-lane, 6-port device. Devices for control-plane traffic include 32-, 24-, 16- and 12-lane devices with port counts of 24-, 16- and 12-port devices in various configurations.

The new family of interconnect solutions is currently sampling and will be generally available in 1Q 2010. Each device will 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.

The new IDT PCIe solutions range from $36.20 to $52.00 for 10,000 units and come in 19mm and 23mm Ball Gate Array (BGA) packages.