PCIe 4.0 switch chip targets ADAS, autonomous driving
Microchip Technology has launched the industry’s first automotive qualified switches for the fourth generation PCI Express (PCIe 4.0).
The Switchtec PFX, PSX, and PAX switch devices provide low latency connection for Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems (ADAS) and emerging designs for autonomous vehicles with high performance computing sub-systems.
PCIe is emerging as the preferred compute interconnect for the automotive industry for the same reasons it has become pervasive in the data centre market, says Microchip. It provides low latency and low power bandwidth scalability to CPUs and specialized accelerator devices such as those from Nvidia, and this is extending to automotive ADAS and autonomous system designs.
The PCI Express standard is now on the sixth generation (PCIe 6.0). Mocrochip has the first Gen 5 PCIe devices for the data centre with 32 Gigatransfers/sec (GT/s). The Gen 4 devices support 16 GT/s and up to 100 lanes with 52 ports and 48 Non-Transparent Bridges (NTBs) and 26 virtual switch partitions. The devices have 100-lane, 84-lane, 68-lane, 52-lane, 36-lane and 28-lane variants with a focus on reliability with robust error containment, hot- and surprise-plug controllers per port, end-to-end data integrity protection and ECC protection on memories.
“Our automotive-qualified portfolio of Switchtec Gen 4 switches provides the lowest latency and high bandwidth required to link the CPU and accelerator building blocks used in ADAS applications,” said Krishna Mallampati, Associate Director of Marketing and Applications for Microchip’s data centre solutions business unit. “We are delighted to see the culmination of several years of collaboration with key technology partners and customers to bring these solutions to market.”
“The qualification of Microchip’s solutions to meet the stringent needs of the automotive market is a significant milestone, and one Nvidia closely collaborated on,” said Michael Truog, senior director of Automotive Platform Architecture at Nvidia. “Microchip’s automotive PCIe switches deliver flexibility and advanced programmability, enabling high-speed SoC and GPU connectivity within our DRIVE platform.”
Microchip’s ChipLink diagnostic Graphical User Interface (GUI) provides debug, diagnostics, configuration and forensics tools for rapid deployment.
Switchtec automotive-qualified Gen 4 PCIe switches are available in production.
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