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A few months ago, I posted a piece about PLDA expanding its support for two emerging protocol standards: CXL™ and Gen-Z™.  The Compute Express Link (CXL) specification defines a set of three protocols that run on top of the PCIe PHY layer. The current revision of the CXL (2.0) specification runs with the PCIe 5.0 PHY layer at a maximum link rate of 32GT/s per lane. There are a lot of parts to this specification and multiple implementation options, so a comprehensive support package will significantly help adoption. This is why PLDA brings flexible support for compute express link (CXL) to SoC and FPGA designers.

The Options

The three previously mentioned protocols that make up CXL are:

PLDA XpressLINK™ CXL Controller IP combines the industry’s lowest latency implementation with an easy-to-integrate design, accelerating adoption of CXL in SoC designs.

PLDA, the industry leader in high-speed interconnect solutions, today announced the successful CXL™ interoperability with pre-production Intel Xeon processors code named Sapphire Rapids. The session was conducted at Intel’s Industry Enabling Labs as part of a long-term collaboration between PLDA and Intel’s industry enabling group. It resulted in demonstrated interoperability between PLDA’s XpressLINK™ CXL IP, running on a PLDA FPGA-based add-in card, and Intel’s development platform equipped with pre-production “Sapphire Rapids” processors.

PLDA, the industry leader in high-speed Interconnect solutions, today announced CXL 2.0 support for its XpressLINK™ and XpressLINK-SOC™ CXL IP solutions. Compute Express Link™ (CXL) is an open industry interconnect standard that builds on PCI Express® 5.0 infrastructure to enable memory coherency and low latency between processors and accelerators. The CXL 2.0 specification introduces additional functionality including first level switching, memory pooling and sharing, and Hot Plug, which aim to deliver important benefits for hyperconverged datacenter and HPC applications.

PLDA’s long track record of PCIe® innovation and success has given them an edge in CXL development, and their XpressLINK CXL IP is available now for integration into cutting-edge designs. Key features of PLDA XpressLINK CXL IP include:

PLDA XpressSWITCH IP passed all Gold and Interoperability tests as a Switch Component at PCIe 4.0 architecture speed (16 GT/s)

XpressSWITCH™ IP is the Industry’s first switch Soft IP (SIP) to pass all Gold and Interoperability tests at the PCI-SIG® Compliance Workshop 115, held online in October 2020.  The testing was conducted using PLDA XpressSWITCH IP for the PCI Express® (PCIe®) 4.0 specification, running on a FPGA based add-in card with both upstream and downstream ports operating at 16 GT/s.

The demonstration reaffirms the reliability and flexibility of the combined solution for SoC designers

PLDA, the industry leader in PCI Express® controller IP solutions has today unveiled their PCIe 5.0 demonstration.  The demo showcases stable PCIe 5.0 Link Training (32 GT/s) and exceptional signal integrity with a Broadcom® PCIe 5.0 PHY platform.

We recently published a Webinar about the benefits of CXL to reduce latency. After exploring the following topics:

PLDA, Aldec and Avery joinly present and demonstrate a new PCIe 5.0 IP + VIP UVM simulation and debugging environment. PLDA's PCIe 5.0 XpressRICH features include automatic datapath scaling, configurable pipelining (enabling optimal solutions in both ASIC and FPGA), RX Stream mode for custom credit management, L1 PM substrates, dynamically adjustable application clock frequency and clock/power gating.

PLDA, the industry leader in PCI Express® IP and data interconnect solutions, today announced the Robust Verification Toolset, a breakthrough approach to IP verification dramatically increasing Design accuracy and speeding-up the time-to-market. The verification process for IP design takes place at the front end of chip design and requires a high level of reliability to prevent production delays. Achieving the necessary levels of verification can be time-consuming, however cutting corners in verification often results in costly and difficult bug fixes at the end of chip fabrication.

In this video, we will show you just how easy it is  to configure an embedded  PCIe switch with the XpressSWITCH wizard.

In order to address the increased density of silicon chips and the high performance required by applications in Enterprise Storage and Networking, High performance computing, and AI, SoC designers now have the ability to embed  a PCIe switch instead of employing a traditional external PCIe switch chip.

This enables much reduced latency, power consumption, and complexity, by removing the need for external PHYs.