Microchip Switchtec PFX PCIe 5.0 Switches

Applications such as data analytics, autonomous-driving and medical diagnostics are driving demands for ML and hyperscale compute infrastructure.

To meet these demands, Microchip Technology Inc. announced a PCIe 5.0 switch solutions – the Switchtec PFX PCIe 5.0 family – doubling the interconnect performance for dense compute, high speed networking and NVMe storage. Together with the XpressConnect retimers, the company is a supplier of both PCIe Gen 5 switches and PCIe Gen 5 retimer products, delivering a portfolio of PCIe Gen 5 infrastructure solutions with interoperability.

“Accelerators, graphic processing units, central processing units and high-speed network adapters continue to drive the need for higher performance PCIe infrastructure. Microchip’s introduction of the world’s first PCIe 5.0 switch doubles the PCIe Gen 4 interconnect link rates to 32GT/s to support the most demanding next-gen ML platforms,” said Andrew Dieckmann, associate VP, marketing and applications engineering, data center solutions business unit. “Coupled with our XpressConnect family of PCIe 5.0 and Compute Express Link (CXL) 1.1/2.0 retimers, Microchip offers the industry’s broadest portfolio of PCIe Gen 5 infrastructure solutions with the lowest latency and end-to-end interoperability.“

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

“Intel’s upcoming Sapphire Rapids Xeon processors will implement PCIe 5.0 and Compute Express Link running up to 32.0GT/s to deliver the low-latency and high-bandwidth I/O solutions our customers need to deploy,” said Dr. Debendra Das Sharma, director, I/O technology and standards, Intel fellow, Intel Corp. “We are pleased to see Microchip’s PCIe 5.0 switch and retimer investment strengthen the ecosystem and drive broader deployment of PCIe 5.0 and CXL enabled solutions.“

Development tools
The company has released a set of design-in collateral, reference designs, evaluation boards and tools to support customers building systems that take advantage of the PCIe 5.0.

In addition to PCIe technology, it also provides data center infrastructure builders worldwide with total system solutions including RAID over NVMe, storage, memory, timing and synchronization systems, stand-alone secure boot, secure firmware and authentication, wireless products, touch-enabled displays to configure and monitor data center equipment and predictive fan controls.

The Switchtec PFX PCIe 5.0 family of switches are sampling to qualified customers.