Pushing the Frontier in Managing Power in Embedded ASIC or SoC Design with PCI Express

PCI Express is architected to not only meet the demand of high-bandwidth, robustness and reliability of today's system connectivity, but also to address one of the most critical areas in the embedded ASIC or SoC designs which is to manage power and to reduce power consumption. This paper will discuss some techniques applicable to PCI Express such as changing device power states in coordination with operating system, managing clocks and managing device drivers. In addition, this presentation will present a trade-off analysis between latency and clock frequency with respect to power consumption. The paper will present the PCI Express link power management in details. Moreover, some power-related guidelines such as power well isolation will be suggested for the system designer integrating PCI Express into embedded ASIC or SoC designs... read more

PCI Express - A Technology-laden Technology for the Future

PCI Express - as the name suggests is an express version of PCI/PCI-X. PCI Express is a serial protocol unlike PCI/PCI-X. Thanks to the gigabit Ethernet and fiber channel which made serial PHY technology stable enough to drive PCI Express. PCI Express is a versatile technology, which can be implemented wherever there is a requirement for high-speed data transfer...read more

PCI Express - Driving the Future

The credit for the success of all serial technologies - Ethernet, Fiber Channel, SATA, SAS, and now PCI Express, goes to 8/10b encoder and 10/8b decoder scheme from IBM. The fundamentals of all serial technologies, i.e. the physical layer is similar - revolves around 8/10b encoder, 10/8b decoder, scrambler, de-scrambler and elasticity buffer. PCI Express is destined to drive the serial technology hard enough to make it cost-effective to get into other technologies/applications. What are these other application/areas? This paper will give some insight into these ...read more

PCI Express - Sizing Replay Buffer Appropriately and Achieving High Throughput

PCI Express is a very powerful technology with lots of good features that makes it suitable for high-performance chip-to-chip interconnect needs. The overall performance of the systems depends how quickly the data flow from node to node, and also how efficiently the data flow from end to end. The replay mechanism in PCI Express helps to boost the end-to-end performance by being able to resend packets locally between nodes ...read more