These new PCIe switches are the industry’s lowest power consuming and smallest devices, offered in a quad flat no-lead (QFN) package. Available in multiple package options for greater flexibility in customer and end-user applications, the devices reduce customers’ total cost of ownership by minimizing system thermal management requirements. The new PCIe switch family makes serial connectivity available for PC, consumer and embedded applications that were previously unable to take advantage of the benefits of serial connectivity due to price-point, excessive power consumption and board real estate limitations.
The new family is PCIe specification 1.1 compliant and features devices with two to four downstream x1 connections to enable I/O connectivity of key endpoints that have migrated from PCI to PCIe and the ability to select upstream connectivity from x1, x2 or x4 to match system throughput requirements. Each device is designed for high performance with a low latency, cut-through architecture, deep buffering and support for large maximum payload sizes to afford designers performance headroom to adapt to rapidly changing market requirements characteristic of consumer applications.
Each member of the IDT PCIe family of switches has a dedicated evaluation and development kit for device testing and analysis, and system emulation. Each kit consists of a hardware evaluation board with representative upstream and downstream connectivity, and an IDT-developed, GUI-based software environment that enables the designer to tune system and device configurations to meet system requirements.