PCIe Benefits From AI, Despite Scaling Protocols


Key takeaways: PCIe remains a critical technology for non-AI processing. For AI, PCIe will be strengthened by scale-out, agentic AI, and even some scale-up. CXL is seeing uptake, and some even think it could participate in AI processing. PCIe has been the go-to network for most data traffic moving from a processor to devices located elsewhere, which is also what the new data... » read more

High-Speed Manufacturing And In-Field Scan Test Access Via PCI Express For GPIO Limited SoCs


By Ash Patel and Shubharthi Datta, Synopsys, and Chuanyun Fan, Cisco Today’s huge, deep submicron system on chip (SoC) designs present many challenges at every stage of development, from architectural exploration to volume production. This post addresses the specific hurdle of effective and efficient manufacturing tests for these complex devices. It outlines a commercially available soluti... » read more

Beyond PCIe Compliance: Why Stress Testing Is Crucial For Edge AI Deployments


Passing PCI Express (PCIe) compliance is different from being ready for the field. A PCIe link can clear every test in a controlled lab environment and still develop margin problems six months into deployment. That’s because a compliance traffic generator isn’t designed to replicate real-world operating conditions, such as thermal stress, electrical noise, and the kind of bursty inference t... » read more

Options Grow For Standardizing Data Movement And Sharing Resources


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss memory interfaces, interconnects, and memory access scaling with Madhumita Sanyal, senior director of technical product management at Synopsys; Swadesh Choudhary, senior principal engineer at Intel; Siamak Tavallaei, senior principal engineer at Samsung SSI; and Mohsen Asad, senior director of technology at Credo. What follows are excerpts of a disc... » read more

Confusion Grows With More Interconnect Options And Tradeoffs


Key Takeaways: Designers are frequently evaluating 5 or more different interconnects in a single system, each with a distinct purpose. While chip-to-chip (PCIe) and die-to-die (UCIe, BoW) technologies seem to be solving a similar problem, in practice they bring different challenges. PCIe, CXL, NVLink, and UALink are all active in the hyperscaler space, but Ethernet-based technologies... » read more

Scaling PCIe Controllers for AI Bandwidth: A Multistream Architecture Analysis for 64 GT/s and 128 GT/s


Scaling raw lane speed without rethinking controller microarchitecture leads to diminishing returns. It introduces multistream architecture, a controller‑level re‑architecture designed to sustain effective bandwidth under mixed and small‑packet workloads. This paper examines the architectural inflection point at PCIe 6.0, details transmit‑ and receive‑side changes required for multist... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Manufacturing ASE and WUS are jointly building a ~$1.1B advanced packaging hub in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, for fan-out chip-on-substrate (FOCoS) and flip-chip ball grid array (FC BGA) technologies. The new site is expected to be completed by September 2029. SpaceX filed documents for a “Terafab” semiconductor manufacturing and computing facility at Gibbons Creek Reservoir in Texas, with a... » read more

Unlocking High-Speed Serial Link Signal Integrity With AMI Model


As the demand for faster data rates in high-speed interfaces such as PCIe, USB, and DDR continues to escalate, maintaining signal integrity has become a significant challenge for engineers. Traditional SPICE-based simulations, while precise, often suffer from computational intensity, making it impractical to model the intricate behavior of high-speed signals across millions of bits. This is ... » read more

PCIe 8.0: Enabling The Next Generation Of High Bandwidth Systems


As compute architectures evolve to support increasingly data‑intensive workloads, the role of high‑speed I/O has never been more critical. Artificial intelligence, high‑performance computing, hyperscale infrastructure, and advanced networking all depend on moving massive volumes of data efficiently, reliably, and at scale. The PCI‑SIG’s announcement of PCIe 8.0, which targets 256.0... » read more

PCIe Technology in Switches


Two benefits of using PCIe switches include accessibility to more endpoints and enabling data center disaggregation. Rambus's Lou Ternullo and Wesley Yung from Astera Labs discuss benefits, use cases, and PCIe technology used in switches in this video from PCI-SIG. Hear more about the technology here. » read more

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