XpressSWITCH

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.

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.

XpressSWITCH Embedded Switch IP for PCIe running on a Bittware 250S+ Near Storage Accelerator card and allowing up to 4 NVMe SSDs to be accessed simultaneously at full PCIe speed.

The combination of PLDA XpressSWITCH Switch IP for PCIe and Bittware 250s+ Storage FPGA card is the ideal solution for building intelligent storage accelerators integrating multiple NVMe SSDs in a compact PCIe form factor.

1. Introduction

Modern enterprise workloads in AI and data analytics are driving the need for new compute and storage architectures in IT infrastructures. The growing use of accelerators (GPUs, FPGAs, custom ASICs) and emerging memory technologies (3D XPoint, Storage Class Memory, Persistent Memory), and the need to better distribute and utilize these resources are fueling the transition to composable/disaggregated infrastructures (CDI) in data centers.

PLDA to Demonstrate Industry’s First PCIe® 4.0 Switch Platform with Multiple Downstream Ports during PCI-SIG DevCon 2018

PLDA Switch IP for PCIe is a customizable and scalable switch design intended to be embedded into ASIC, SoC, and FPGA. PCIe® architecture has become a standard in the enterprise space due to the advantages it provides in term of performance and reliability. Embedding a configurable PCIe switch IP into chip designs provides developers with extra flexibility, scalability and reliability when interconnecting multiple PCIe devices, with significant gains in term of latency and power consumption compared to ASSP solutions.