Xilinx’s programmable PCI Express endpoint silicon product has passed all the latest PCI Express compliance and interoperability tests. The company says that its two-chip solution is the industry’s lowest cost programmable PCI Express solution to be added to the PCI-SIG PCI Express Integrators List and to demonstrate full compliance to the PCI Express 1.0a specification. It costs under US$12.00 in high volumes.
The solution comprises a Philips PX1011A PCI Express PHY, a Xilinx Spartan-3 FPGA and an optimised Xilinx PCI Express LogiCORE IP core. It is suited to applications including consumer video and audio, medical imaging, test equipment, graphics cards and high-end servers.
The Philips PCI Express PHY brings the SERDES serialiser/deserialiser and the Physical Coding Sub-Layer (PCS) for good bit rate performance. The Philips PHY consumes little power and is small enough for ExpressCard applications. The Xilinx Spartan-3 FPGA portion combines block and distributed RAM, up to 784 I/Os, MicroBlaze 32-bit RISC soft processors and embedded XtremeDSP supporting multiply and accumulates (MAC) functions. Dedicated 18x18 multipliers deliver up to 330bn MACs per second.
A fully loaded reference design and design kit is immediately available in limited quantities for this low-cost solution through Tentmaker Systems (www.tentmakersystems.com).