Industry Expert Blogs

Lane Margining which was introduced in PCIe 4.0 and has been a very important technology since then. With the doubling of the bandwidth from 8 GT/s to 16 GT/s per Lane in formulating the PCIe 4.0 specifications, there arises the need-to-know overall link health as channels are pushed near operating limits by frequency doubling. By link health I mean -how much signaling margin is available in the design to squeeze out full 16GT/s performance. It’s now very important to determine the link health while running the actual traffic.

To address these challenges, PCIe 4.0 introduces a new feature that takes place when the Link is in L0. While designers have their own ways of calculating the margin information and evaluate the signal quality but there has been no industry standard before. PCIe 4.0 was standardized and mandated it for the ports that support 16GT/s and above.

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