Enabling High Speed Interfaces – Pericom at IDF

 September 2011 – The new processors and chipset systems shown at Intel Developer Forum, now support a number of high speed (around and near 5Gbps) interfaces. These connections – HDMI, Display Port (DP), USB 3.0, PCIe Gen 3, and Thunderbolt all operate a low power (3.3 and dual 3.3v/1.5v) from the main chipset for the system. The high speeds result in a limited drive distance for both the PCB and the length of external cable that can be attached. These issues are exasperated in tablet applications where minimum drive lengths are the norm, for single ports, due to power.

To address these issues and also allow for multiple ports from a single interface, Pericom has released a series of new ReDriver chips for the 5Gbps marketplace. The adoption of SuperSpeed USB 3.0 is now on a rapid pace for end client side devices (storage, cameras/camcorders, scanners, etc) and typically work with very short (under 2 ft) 28AWG cables. For practical use, people want 2-3 meter cables so they do not have to move thier docking station, or bend down to connect to a desktop platform when transferring data from a camera (still or video) source. The Pericom redriver supports the 3M cable length with light wires (32AWG) for low cost single direction traffic, bi-directional traffic and dual bi-directional traffic at the full 5Gbps data rate. The redrivers are endpoint certified, so there is no need to re-qualify a system for including them in the system.

Pericom High Speed Redrivers

The use diagram also shows the re-driver for the 5.4Gbps DP applications of long lines for the monitor. This is key as many of the systems support more than one monitor. Advanced dual GPU systems can now support up to five 1080p screens, and up to 4Kx2K support. The cabling for these systems is a significant load for the base graphics chips, and the redrivers maintain the signal integrity at high speed, almost no degradation of the “eye”, at very low power. The DP Redriver supports V1.1 and V1.2 of the specification, and also support the display portion of the Thunderbolt interface.

Pericom PCIeG3 8Gbps 2:1 mux/demux PI3PCIe3415

 The last new member of this redriver/mux family is for the PCIeG3 bus. The typical configuration is to have 16 lanes on the PCIe bus. The chip can mux for 8 single ended channels /4 differential, (2 full lanes) to one or two locations at the full 8.0Gbps data rate.and the signals so you can split it to two sets of 8 lanes for supporting dual GPU cards in a system, or a GPU/graphics card and a PCIe SSD card. The part operates in bi-directional mode with a 3.3v supply, and features channel-to-channel skew of 20ps max.

All of the parts are available in Q4 of 2011.

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