Companies collaborate in design of low cost PCI Express solutions

20 October 2004 DSP, Micros & Memory

Royal Philips Electronics and Xilinx intend to collaborate in the design of semiconductor hardware and intellectual property related to the PCI Express interface. The work is expected to result in PCI Express solutions that help customers easily migrate from legacy PC bus architectures to the new, simplified PCI Express high-speed interface architecture. The move to PCI Express by consumer product manufacturers will ultimately benefit consumers, says Philips, offering fast and easy transfer of video and graphics from PCs to home theatre equipment.

The solution will be based on Xilinx' 90 nm Spartan-3 FPGAs and Philips' PCI Express PHY devices. PCI Express is the successor to Intel's PCI and PCI-X architectures used in PCs, offering scalable bandwidth from 2,5 to 80 Gbps and advanced features to meet the I/O needs of next generation systems. Its layered architecture allows future add-ons for connections to copper, optical and other emerging physical signalling media.

The PCI Express bus interface offers a number of inherent improvements beyond the pure speed play. It is a two-wire connection replacing current 16- or 32-wire bus connections. It also puts out less EMI, in addition to requiring fewer layers on the PCB, thereby reducing manufacturing and material costs.

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