Altera’s FPGAs Are First to Demonstrate Support for PCI Express 2.0

Altera's FPGAs Are First to Demonstrate Support for PCI Express 2.0

Altera Corporation announced support for the PCI Express (PCIe) 2.0 specification, PCIe 1.1 and 2.0 signals on cables and backplanes, with its Stratix® II GX FPGAs. With up to 20 low-power transceivers, Stratix II GX family is the only high-density production FPGA capable of delivering 100 Gbps of aggregate bandwidth on FR-4 circuit boards and backplanes up to 1 m in length, using the new 5-GT/s PCIe 2.0 specification from PCI-SIG.

Altera demonstrations showcase 5-GT/s PCIe 2.0 compliance using the Stratix II GX-based PLDA XpressGXII prototyping board. In another demonstration, Stratix II GX FPGAs reliably transmit data over an unprecedented 30 m (98 feet) of PCI Express cable at the PCIe 1.1 and 2.0 rate of 2.5Gbps, and on 1 m (39 inches) of FR-4 backplane at the PCIe 2.0 rate of 5Gbps.

The unrivaled level of signal integrity performance, margin and robustness is made possible by exploiting the advanced channel-loss compensating features of Stratix II GX low-power transceivers, and by using on-chip voltage regulators to provide noise immunity. Molex is demonstrating 5-Gbps PCIe 2.0 capability using Stratix II GX transceivers over 15 m (49 feet) of their iPass^TM  PCIe cable and on 1 m of their I-Trac^TM  backplane.