Cadence Video Demonstrates PCIe Gen3 IP Silicon Performance

It is not often that an IP provider gets to showcase their IP performance in a real product demo. Those laurels usually end up going to the end product that uses the IP. But a recent Cadence video features our PCI Express (PCIe) Gen 3 core running flawlessly in silicon in a real system.

We thought we would raise some eyebrows since, as of today, there are very few products in the market that utilize the full power of the PCIe Gen3 protocol, let alone those that have been designed using a commercial IP offering. Cadence has been working very closely with its early PCIe Gen3 customer, PMC-Sierra, to develop a Gen3 X8 Dual-mode controller IP with full support for the PCIe 3.0 specification, including SR-IOV and all ECNs. This IP interfaces to the PCIe bus on PMC's 6Gb/s SAS/SATA controller chip that is installed in Adaptec's RAID controller card.

In this demo we are showing the high storage data throughput between the Intel Sandy Bridge PC and the array of SATA SSD drives via the Adaptec HBA card. All the hardware used in the demo, with the exception of the soon-to-be-available Adaptec card, uses off-the-shelf components that you can buy from any hardware store. The demo is around 4 minutes in length, and I invite you to take a look. And if you are a PCIe geek as I am, this might take your breath away!

Click on the icon below to view the demo, or click here.

Ashwin Matta