PCI Express 4.0 to offer double the performance

The PCI Special Interest Group (PC-SIG) announced there will be one more PCI Express standard before having to make the switch from copper to optical interconnects. The PCI Express 4.0 standard is expected to arrive around 2015 and promises 16 gigatransfers per second, double as much as the PCI Express 3.0 standard.

"The initial report we got yesterday is a PCI Express 4.0 is feasible--we have to work out the details, but it is feasible," said Al Yanes, president of the PCI SIG, speaking in a press briefing at the group's annual developers conference.

A exploratory group including members from AMD, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Intel are conducting simulations using chip, channel, packet and socket data. They have determined throughput of at least 16 GT/s is possible and are expected to deliver a final report before the end of the year.

"We think we can eke out one more turn of the crank out of copper, so we are not looking at optics yet," said Ramin Neshanti, chairman of the PCI SIG's serial communications working chair.

It took the PCI SIG about four years to hammer out its 8 GT/s PCIe Gen 3 spec which required new signal encoding and equalization schemes. The Gen 4 spec should take a similar period, but this time the focus will be less on silicon and more on the board-level channels through which signals pass, Neshanti said.
Specifically, Gen 4 will probably be limited to distances of about eight to 12 inches compared to 20 inches for Gen 3. Engineers wanting longer reaches will need to use repeaters, a potential growth area for PCIe silicon.

The Gen 4 boards may need to use new materials, via designs and backwards-compatible connectors designed for improved signal integrity to reduce impedance discontinuities. "We think we have achieved about as much as we can scaling silicon," said Neshanti who also serves as an I/O standards manager at Intel.

That's a big shift for the PCIe community which has not previously required major changes of board makers. Typically the PCI SIG has thrown its hardest problems to chip makers such as AMD, Intel, NEC and others to ease problems for its less technically sophisticated supply chain among high volume PC board and system makers.

Nevertheless, some significant silicon shifts are ahead. Transceivers for Gen 3 were the first to use techniques to massage signals, adopting single-tap decision feedback equalization (DFE).