Cadence Design Systems, a designer of semiconductors, showcases its integration-ready, proven PCI Express 3.0 solutions at the 2011 PCI-SIG developers conference. Cadence demonstrated design and verification IP that supports v1.0 of the PCI Express 3.0 specification.

Cadence claims that there are more than 10 designs taped-out using its PCI Express 3.0 IP and more than 50 designs verified with its PCI Express 3.0 VIP, Cadence highlights how customers can rapidly design and verify ASIC or SoC devices for emerging PCI Express 3.0 applications like storage, supercomputing, enterprise and networking. The company plans to highlight its PCI Express 3.0 controller IP, as well as verification IP and design-in kits for package-to-board implementation.

Cadence reportedly demonstrated a high-performance, dual-mode, 128-bit data-path, x8 PCI Express 3.0 controller configuration implemented in silicon on an advanced-node PMC-Sierra ASIC. The Cadence PCI Express 3.0 controller is integrated in an ASIC on a reference card which connects to a PCI Express 3.0 backplane exerciser and a PCI Express Gen3 logic analyzer to demonstrate PCI Express 3.0 traffic running at 8 GT/s per lane.

Cadence PCI Express 3.0 design IP has been successfully implemented in silicon with advanced capabilities like Single-Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) and the latest engineering change notices (ECNs) such as ID-based Ordering, Re-Sizeable BARs, Atomic Operations, Transaction Processing Hints, Optimized Buffer Flush/Fill, Latency Tolerance Reporting and Dynamic Power Allocation. The Cadence PCI Express 3.0 IP has already been implemented in the recently announced PMC-Sierra 6Gb/s SAS Tachyon protocol controller.

Cadence will also demonstrate its PCI Express 3.0 VIP solution. The demonstration will show a  Compliance Management System (CMS) for the PCI Express protocol which provides interactive, graphical analysis of coverage results correlated directly to the protocol specification, and PureSuite which provides thousands of test cases to simulate PCI Express traffic and check for compliance with the PCI Express specifications.

Tags: Cadence, PCI Express, PCIe