In early 2022, the PCIe 6.0 standard specification was officially released. Although it has yet to get a commercial landing, the next generation of PCIe 7.0 is already in development and introduces optical communication connectivity.
PCIe 6.0 is considered to be the most changed improvement in the last 20 years, with a change in the signal modulation mechanism to PAM4, as well as support for the FEC forward error correction mechanism and FLIT flow control unit coding. In addition, the bandwidth has doubled, enabling x16 bidirectional transfer rates of up to 256GB/s.
However, with conventional thinking having essentially run its course, it has become extremely difficult to make further enhancements. However, at the PCIG-SIG DevCon 2024 developer conference, Cadence demonstrated for the first time in the world a new direction for PCIe 7.0 – adding its unique optical connection scheme.
This connection system requires no retiming, is linearly optical, and has true low latency. Through testing, in such a system to achieve up to 128GT / s transceiver rate. In other words, x16 bi-directional bandwidth of up to 512GB/s was achieved.
Perfect signal integrity and smoothness were demonstrated throughout the demonstration.
In fact, in August last year, the PCI-SIG set up a special research team to study the new PCIe standard based on optical interfaces. Although it has not yet been determined whether PCIe 7.0 will adopt an optical solution, backward compatibility certainly is one of the traditional advantages of PCIe.
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