Clock buffers and multiplexers meet PCIe Gen6 specs

Renesas Electronics Corp. has claimed the first clock buffers and multiplexers that meet PCIe Gen6 specifications. Complementing the company’s low-jitter 9SQ440, 9FGV1002,  and 9FGV1006 clock generators, Renesas has added 11 new clock buffers and four new clock multiplexers that also provide extra margin for PCIe Gen5 implementations. Together, these devices offer a complete PCIe Gen6 timing solution for data center/cloud computing, networking, and high-speed industrial applications.

The PCIe Gen6 standard supports high data rates of 64 GT/s while requiring very low clock jitter performance of less than 100 fs RMS. The new RC190xx clock buffers and RC192xx multiplexers provide PCIe Gen6 additive jitter specs of only 4 fs RMS, which makes them virtually noiseless, said Renesas, and future-proofed for the next generation of industry standards.

Other key specs for the new click buffers and multiplexers include 1.4 ns in-out delay, 35 ps out-out skew, and -80 dB power supply rejection ratio (PSRR) at 100 kHz. The devices also provide selectable SMBus addresses, SMBus write-protect for enhanced system security, a loss-of-signal output, and a four-wire side-band interface to support high-speed serial output enable/disable and device daisy-chaining.

The devices aoffer power down tolerant and flexible start-up sequencing features to ensure good behavior under abnormal system conditions, said Renesas. They also provide a 30 percent space savings compared to earlier devices.

A new winning combination design that uses the new RC190xx clock buffers and RC192xx multiplexers with Renesas’ analog and power offerings provide full power and timing for Intel’s latest generation Xeon CPU platform. The pre-tested design includes the Renesas 9SQ440 clock generator, multiple smart power stage devices, an LDO, a USB host controller, and a DDR5 server PMIC.