The Switchtec PFX PCIe 5.0 family

Microchip accelerates machine learning and hyperscale computing infrastructure with the world’s first PCI Express® 5.0 switches.  The Switchtec™ PFX PCIe® Gen 5 high performance switches double the data rate of PCIe Gen 4.0 solutions while delivering ultra-low latency and advanced diagnostics.

Applications such as data analytics, autonomous-driving and medical diagnostics are driving extraordinary demands for machine learning and hyperscale compute infrastructure. To meet these demands, Microchip Technology announced the world’s first PCI Express (PCIe) 5.0 switch solutions — the Switchtec PFX PCIe 5.0 family — doubling the interconnect performance for dense compute, high speed networking and NVM Express® (NVMe®) storage. Together with the XpressConnect™ retimers, Microchip is the industry’s only supplier of both PCIe Gen 5 switches and PCIe Gen 5 retimer products, delivering a complete portfolio of PCIe Gen 5 infrastructure solutions with proven interoperability.

Features

The Switchtec PFX PCIe 5.0 switch family comprises high density, high reliability switches supporting 28 lanes to 100 lanes and up to 48 non-transparent bridges (NTBs). The Switchtec technology devices support high reliability capabilities, including hot-and surprise-plug as well as secure boot authentication. With PCIe 5.0 data rates of 32 GT/s, signal integrity and complex system topologies pose significant development and debug challenges. To accelerate time-tomarket, the Switchtec PFX PCIe 5.0 switch provides a comprehensive suite of debug and diagnostic features including sophisticated internal PCIe analyzers supporting Transaction Layer Packet (TLP) generation and analysis and on-chip non-obtrusive SerDes eye capture capabilities. Rapid system bring-up and debug is further supported with ChipLink — an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI) based device configuration and topology viewer that provides full access to the PFX PCIe switch’s registers, counters, diagnostics and forensic capture capabilities. .

Target applications

Data analytics, autonomous-driving and medical diagnostics