Test tools to empower engineers for PCIe 3.0 designs

Roger Lai, PLX Technology
EETimes (3/9/2011 8:16 AM EST)

It took five years for the industry to migrate from PCI Express 1.0 (introduced in 2002) to PCI Express 2.0 (introduced in 2007). Now, the next wave is here - PCI Express 3.0. 

Known commonly as PCIe Gen 1, Gen 2 or Gen 3, reflecting on successive generations, it’s the preferred interconnect for scalable systems, devices and applications such as high-end graphics, fault-tolerant clusters, and storage IO sharing networks.  PCIe Gen 3 features 8Gb/s bandwidth, which is double that of Gen 2, while preserving compatibility with software and mechanical interfaces.  It also has better provisions for reduced power, signal and data integrity, new transmit and receive equalization methods, and clock data recovery.

Anticipating this new wave of Gen 3 systems and devices, new test tools will be needed to ensure the hardware and software are functional and work together.  This article will survey those hardware and software tools for validation, compliance and general testing.

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