PICMG, a leading standards organisation for the communications, military and embedded computer industries, announced a new revision and upgrade to the CompactPCI Express specification, Revision 2.
The new revision adds 5 gigabits per second transfer rate and 8 gigabits per second transfer rate PCI Express operation. This provides up to four times the bandwidth while maintaining full backwards compatibility with previous CompactPCI and CompactPCI Express products. Also, this specification goes to great length to define how a product’s PCI Express signalling is validated to ensure interoperability.
“This revision of CompactPCI Express, like the first release of the specification, focuses on interoperability at both the interface and product level but with the additional benefit of dramatically increasing performance,” said Mark Wetzel, the Technical Chair of the CompactPCI Express Subcommittee and Distinguished Engineer at National Instruments.
“This will allow rapid adoption in instrumentation and control applications where performance and interoperability are critical. The PXI standard which currently builds on top of CompactPCI and CompactPCI Express will see immediate benefit from this new revision.”
About CompactPCI
CompactPCI, first adopted as an open industry standard in 1995, is a very popular standard for implementing a wide range of communications, industrial automation, instrumentation, and military and aerospace applications. It uses the popular and proven Eurocard 3U and 6U mechanical standards and can be convection- or conduction-cooled.
CompactPCI Express, which was first introduced in 2005, added PCI Express signalling capability across the backplane while maintaining backwards compatibility with earlier versions of CompactPCI. CompactPCI Express is popular in the same applications as original CompactPCI, and provides higher performance with little or no increase in cost.
The CompactPCI family of standards has been growing since the original version was ratified in 1995, and represents over $500 million in annual revenues. CompactPCI was the first open standard that provided reliable hot swap operation and was the first standard to incorporate a switched Ethernet backplane fabric in 2000.
More recent versions – CompactPCI Express and CompactPCI Serial – are optimised for instrumentation and control applications and take advantage of newer serial communications standards.
For more information visit www.picmg.org
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