PEX8508-AC25BI G

PEX8508-AC25BI G Datasheet

PEX 8508 General Features

Part	Datasheet
PEX8508-AC25BI G	PEX8508-AC25BI G (pdf)

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Version 2007 PEX 8508 General Features o 8-lane PCI Express switch - Integrated SerDes o Up to five configurable ports o 19mm x 19mm, 296-ball PBGA package o Typical Power Watts PEX 8508 Key Features o Standards Compliant - PCI Express Base Specification, r1.1 - Standard SHPC Specification, r1.1 hot-plug o High Performance - Non-blocking internal architecture - Full line rate on all ports - Cut-Thru latency 150ns o Non-Transparent Bridging - Configurable Non-Transparent port for Multi-Host or Intelligent I/O Support o PCI Express Power Management - Link power management states L0, L0s, L1, L2/L3 Ready, L2 and L3 - Device states D0 and D3hot - Vaux, WAKE#, Beacon support o Spread Spectrum Clock - Dual clock domain o Quality of Service QoS - Two Virtual Channels per port - Eight Traffic Classes per port - Fixed and Round-Robin Virtual Channel Port Arbitration o Reliability, Availability, Serviceability - 5 Standard Hot-Plug Controllers - Upstream port as hot-plug client - Transaction Layer end-to-end CRC - Poison bit - Advanced Error Reporting - Lane Status bits and GPO available - Per port error diagnostics • Bad DLLPs • Bad TLPs • CRC errors - JTAG boundary scan - Fatal Error out-of-band signal option PEX 8508 Flexible & Versatile PCI Switch Multi-purpose and Feature Rich PCI Express Switch Family The ExpressLane PEX 8508 device offers PCI Express switching capability enabling users to add scalable high bandwidth, non-blocking interconnection to a wide variety of applications including intelligent network interface cards, office automation products, mezzanine cards, servers, storage systems, communications platforms, laptop docking stations, and embedded-control products. The PEX 8508 switch can be used as a fan-out or aggregation type switch, and is equally well-suited to peer-to-peer switching applications. Highly Flexible Port Configurations The PEX 8508 offers highly configurable ports. There are a maximum of five ports and eight lanes that can be configured to any legal width from x1 to x4, in any combination to support your specific bandwidth needs. The ports can be symmetric each port having the same lane width or asymmetric ports having different lane widths . If you can think of a port/lane combination, you can configure it! Any of the ports can be designated as the upstream port, and you can even dynamically change the upstream port. End-to-end Packet Integrity The PEX 8508 provides end-to-end CRC protection ECRC and Poison bit support to enable designs that require guaranteed error-free packets. These features are optional in the PCI Express specification, but PLX provides them across its entire ExpressLane switch product line. Non-Transparent “Bridging” in a PCI Express Switch The PEX 8508 supports full non-transparent bridging NTB functionality to allow implementation of multi-host systems and intelligent I/O modules in applications such as intelligent adapter cards, processor isolation, and office automation. To ensure quick product migration, the non-transparency features are implemented in the same fashion as in standard PCI applications. Non-transparent bridges allow systems to isolate memory domains by presenting the processor subsystem as an endpoint, rather than another memory system. Base address registers are used to translate addresses doorbell registers are used to send interrupts between the address domains and scratchpad registers are accessible from both address domains to allow inter-processor communication. Two Virtual Channels The PEX 8508 switch supports two full-featured Virtual Channels VCs and eight Traffic Classes TCs . The mapping of Traffic Classes to port-specific Virtual Channels allows for different mappings for different ports. In addition, the devices offer user-selectable Virtual Channel arbitration algorithms to enable users to fine tune the Quality of Service QoS required for a specific application. Low Power with Granular SerDes Control The PEX 8508 provides low power capability that is compliant with the PCI Express power management specification. The SerDes physical links can be turned off when unused for even lower power. Support for Vaux, Wake#, and Beacon allows D3cold operation and is crucial in such applications as docking stations. Flexible Port Configuration The lane width for each port can be individually configured through auto-negotiation, hardware strapping, upstream software configuration, or through an optional EEPROM. The PEX 8508 supports a large number of port configurations. For example, if you are using the PEX 8508 in a fan-out application, you may configure the upstream port as x4 and the downstream ports as four x1 ports or two x2. In a peer-topeer switch aggregation application you can configure four x2 ports. Figure 1 show most common port configurations. also supports loop-back modes and advanced reporting of error conditions, which enables efficient debug and management of the entire system. Flexible Virtual Channel Arbitration The PEX 8508 switch supports fixed priority and Round Robin arbitration schemes for up to two virtual channels. This allows fine tuning of Quality of Service, efficient use of packet buffers and the system bandwidth. Suitable for host-centric as well as Intelligent I/O applications the PEX 8508 can be configured for a wide variety of form factors and applications. Processor Isolation for Redundancy The PEX 8508 switch, with its low latency, Hot-Plug, and NTB capability, allows users to isolate processors in multihost or failover applications. Figure Common Port Configurations Hot-Plug for High Availability Hot plug capability allows users to replace hardware modules and perform maintenance without powering down the system. The PEX 8508 hot-plug capability and Advanced Error Reporting features makes it suitable for High Availability HA applications. Each port includes a Standard Hot-Plug Controller. If the PEX 8508 is used in an application where one or more of its downstream ports connect to PCI Express slots, each port’s Hot-Plug Controller can be used to manage the hot-plug event of its associated slot. Furthermore, its upstream port is a hot-plug client, allowing it to be used on hot-pluggable adapter cards, backplanes and fabric modules. Fully Compliant Power Management For applications that require power management, the PEX 8508 devices support both link L0, L0s, L1, L2/L3 Ready, L2 and L3 and device D0 and D3hot power management states, in compliance with the PCI Express power management specification. Vaux, Wake# and Beacon support the wakeup protocol from the D3cold state. SerDes Power and Signal Management The PEX 8508 supports software control of the SerDes outputs to allow optimization of power and signal strength in a system. The PLX SerDes implementation supports four levels of power off, low, typical and high. The SerDes block Figure Processor Isolation Figure 2 shows two server boards. The PCI Express switch is used to prevent the backup host from enumerating and configuring portions of the primary host system. In addition, non transparent ports provide doorbell and mailbox registers for inter-processor communications. The backup processor will monitor heartbeat messages from the primary system and upon failure take over as the primary host. PEX 8508 has very low latency, under 150ns, to assist in a rapid failover to the backup system. Here only one PEX 8508 switch is required with the one non transparent port but to maintain identical board layouts, each board shown has a PEX 8508 switch. This application can be generalized to where each compute or storage or I/O board would include a PEX 8508 to isolate each processor domain. Adapter Card Aggregation The number and variety of PCI Express native-mode devices is growing quickly. As these devices become mainstream it will be necessary to create multifunction and multi-port adapter cards with PCI Express capability. The PEX 8508 can be used to create an adapter card that aggregates the PCI Express devices into a single port that can be plugged into a backplane or a motherboard. Figure 3 shows the PEX 8508 in this application. Office Automation Controller A low port/lane PCI Express switch can be very useful in a print engine or similar type system controller in embedded applications. Such designs require low port/lane counts and low cost, yet the system throughput can be very high for graphics oriented data. Figure 5 shows that the PEX 8508 is used to transfer data from a scanner and other input devices to the print engine CPU and back to the marking engine. Many endpoint devices will be incorporating native PCI Express support to allow the use of all five ports of the PEX Complete power management support will reduce system power consumption. With a small 19mm x 19mm footprint, the controller board space can be minimized. Figure Aggregation Adapter Card The adapter card in Figure 3 is transparent with no local processor present. Here four Gigabit Ethernet GE ports are aggregated through the switch. Recent MAC/PHY devices for GE all well as InfiniBand, Fibre Channel, etc., have native PCI Express support for direct connections to the switch. The non-blocking low latency design of PEX 8508 provides full throughput with latency under 150ns. Product Ordering Information Part Number PEX 8508-AC25BI PEX 8508-AC25BI G PEX 8508RDK Description 8-Lane, 5 Port PCIe Switch, 296-ball PBGA 19x19 pkg 8-Lane, 5 Port PCIe Switch, 296-ball PBGA 19x19 pkg, Pb-free Rapid Development Kit for PEX 8508 Please visit the PLX Web site at or contact PLX sales at 408-774-9060 for sampling. 2006 PLX Technology, Inc. All rights reserved. PLX and the PLX logo are registered trademarks of PLX Technology, Inc. ExpressLane is a trademark of PLX Technology, Inc., which may be registered in some jurisdiction. All other product names that appear in this material are for identification purposes only and are acknowledged to be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies. Information supplied by PLX is believed to be accurate and reliable, but PLX Technology, Inc. assumes no responsibility for any errors that may appear in this material. PLX Technology, Inc. reserves the right, without notice, to make changes in product design or specification. PCI8508-SIL-PB-P1-1.7 05/07

PDF Datasheet Preview

Version 2007

PEX 8508 General Features
o 8-lane PCI Express switch - Integrated SerDes
o Up to five configurable ports o 19mm x 19mm, 296-ball PBGA
package o Typical Power Watts

PEX 8508 Key Features
o Standards Compliant - PCI Express Base Specification, r1.1 - Standard SHPC Specification, r1.1 hot-plug
o High Performance - Non-blocking internal architecture - Full line rate on all ports - Cut-Thru latency 150ns
o Non-Transparent Bridging - Configurable Non-Transparent port for Multi-Host or Intelligent I/O Support
o PCI Express Power Management - Link power management states L0, L0s, L1, L2/L3 Ready, L2 and L3 - Device states D0 and D3hot - Vaux, WAKE#, Beacon support
o Spread Spectrum Clock - Dual clock domain
o Quality of Service QoS - Two Virtual Channels per port - Eight Traffic Classes per port - Fixed and Round-Robin Virtual Channel Port Arbitration
o Reliability, Availability, Serviceability - 5 Standard Hot-Plug Controllers - Upstream port as hot-plug client - Transaction Layer end-to-end CRC - Poison bit - Advanced Error Reporting - Lane Status bits and GPO available - Per port error diagnostics
• Bad DLLPs
• Bad TLPs
• CRC errors - JTAG boundary scan - Fatal Error out-of-band signal option

PEX 8508

Flexible & Versatile PCI Switch

Multi-purpose and Feature Rich PCI Express Switch Family

The ExpressLane PEX 8508 device offers PCI Express switching capability enabling users to add scalable high bandwidth, non-blocking interconnection to a wide variety of applications including intelligent network interface cards, office automation products, mezzanine cards, servers, storage systems, communications platforms, laptop docking stations, and embedded-control products. The PEX 8508 switch can be used as a fan-out or aggregation type switch, and is equally well-suited to peer-to-peer switching applications.

Highly Flexible Port Configurations The PEX 8508 offers highly configurable ports. There are a maximum of five ports and eight lanes that can be configured to any legal width from x1 to x4, in any combination to support your specific bandwidth needs. The ports can be symmetric each port having the same lane width or asymmetric ports having different lane widths . If you can think of a port/lane combination, you can configure it! Any of the ports can be designated as the upstream port, and you can even dynamically change the upstream port.

End-to-end Packet Integrity The PEX 8508 provides end-to-end CRC protection ECRC and Poison bit support to enable designs that require guaranteed error-free packets. These features are optional in the PCI Express specification, but PLX provides them across its entire ExpressLane switch product line.

Non-Transparent “Bridging” in a PCI Express Switch The PEX 8508 supports full non-transparent bridging NTB functionality to allow implementation of multi-host systems and intelligent I/O modules in applications such as intelligent adapter cards, processor isolation, and office automation. To ensure quick product migration, the non-transparency features are implemented in the same fashion as in standard PCI applications.

Non-transparent bridges allow systems to isolate memory domains by presenting the processor subsystem as an endpoint, rather than another memory system. Base address registers are used to translate addresses doorbell registers are used to send interrupts between the address domains and scratchpad registers are accessible from both address domains to allow inter-processor communication.

Two Virtual Channels The PEX 8508 switch supports two full-featured Virtual Channels VCs and eight Traffic Classes TCs . The mapping of Traffic Classes to port-specific Virtual Channels allows for different mappings for different ports. In addition, the devices offer user-selectable Virtual Channel arbitration algorithms to enable users to fine tune the Quality of Service QoS required for a specific application.

Low Power with Granular SerDes Control The PEX 8508 provides low power capability that is compliant with the PCI Express power management specification. The SerDes physical links can be turned off when unused for even lower power. Support for Vaux, Wake#, and Beacon allows D3cold operation and is crucial in such applications as docking stations.

Flexible Port Configuration The lane width for each port can be individually configured through auto-negotiation, hardware strapping, upstream software configuration, or through an optional EEPROM.

The PEX 8508 supports a large number of port configurations. For example, if you are using the PEX 8508 in a fan-out application, you may configure the upstream port as x4 and the downstream ports as four x1 ports or two x2. In a peer-topeer switch aggregation application you can configure four x2 ports. Figure 1 show most common port configurations.
also supports loop-back modes and advanced reporting of error conditions, which enables efficient debug and management of the entire system.

Flexible Virtual Channel Arbitration The PEX 8508 switch supports fixed priority and Round Robin arbitration schemes for up to two virtual channels. This allows fine tuning of Quality of Service, efficient use of packet buffers and the system bandwidth.

Suitable for host-centric as well as Intelligent I/O applications the PEX 8508 can be configured for a wide variety of form factors and applications.

Processor Isolation for Redundancy The PEX 8508 switch, with its low latency, Hot-Plug, and NTB capability, allows users to isolate processors in multihost or failover applications.

Figure Common Port Configurations

Hot-Plug for High Availability Hot plug capability allows users to replace hardware modules and perform maintenance without powering down the system. The PEX 8508 hot-plug capability and Advanced Error Reporting features makes it suitable for High Availability HA applications. Each port includes a Standard Hot-Plug Controller. If the PEX 8508 is used in an application where one or more of its downstream ports connect to PCI Express slots, each port’s Hot-Plug Controller can be used to manage the hot-plug event of its associated slot. Furthermore, its upstream port is a hot-plug client, allowing it to be used on hot-pluggable adapter cards, backplanes and fabric modules.

Fully Compliant Power Management For applications that require power management, the PEX 8508 devices support both link L0, L0s, L1, L2/L3 Ready, L2 and L3 and device D0 and D3hot power management states, in compliance with the PCI Express power management specification. Vaux, Wake# and Beacon support the wakeup protocol from the D3cold state.

SerDes Power and Signal Management The PEX 8508 supports software control of the SerDes outputs to allow optimization of power and signal strength in a system. The PLX SerDes implementation supports four levels of power off, low, typical and high. The SerDes block

Figure Processor Isolation

Figure 2 shows two server boards. The PCI Express switch is used to prevent the backup host from enumerating and configuring portions of the primary host system. In addition, non transparent ports provide doorbell and mailbox registers for inter-processor communications. The backup processor will monitor heartbeat messages from the primary system and upon failure take over as the primary host.

PEX 8508 has very low latency, under 150ns, to assist in a rapid failover to the backup system. Here only one PEX 8508 switch is required with the one non transparent port but to maintain identical board layouts, each board shown has a PEX 8508 switch. This application can be generalized to where each compute or storage or I/O board would include a PEX 8508 to isolate each processor domain.

Adapter Card Aggregation The number and variety of PCI Express native-mode devices is growing quickly. As these devices become mainstream it will be necessary to create multifunction and multi-port adapter cards with PCI Express capability.

The PEX 8508 can be used to create an adapter card that aggregates the PCI Express devices into a single port that can be plugged into a backplane or a motherboard. Figure 3 shows the PEX 8508 in this application.

Office Automation Controller A low port/lane PCI Express switch can be very useful in a print engine or similar type system controller in embedded applications. Such designs require low port/lane counts and low cost, yet the system throughput can be very high for graphics oriented data. Figure 5 shows that the PEX 8508 is used to transfer data from a scanner and other input devices to the print engine CPU and back to the marking engine. Many endpoint devices will be incorporating native PCI Express support to allow the use of all five ports of the PEX Complete power management support will reduce system power consumption. With a small 19mm x 19mm footprint, the controller board space can be minimized.

Figure Aggregation Adapter Card

The adapter card in Figure 3 is transparent with no local processor present. Here four Gigabit Ethernet GE ports are aggregated through the switch. Recent MAC/PHY devices for GE all well as InfiniBand, Fibre Channel, etc., have native PCI Express support for direct connections to the switch. The non-blocking low latency design of PEX 8508 provides full throughput with latency under 150ns.
Product Ordering Information

Part Number PEX 8508-AC25BI PEX 8508-AC25BI G PEX 8508RDK

Description 8-Lane, 5 Port PCIe Switch, 296-ball PBGA 19x19 pkg 8-Lane, 5 Port PCIe Switch, 296-ball PBGA 19x19 pkg, Pb-free Rapid Development Kit for PEX 8508

Please visit the PLX Web site at or contact PLX sales at 408-774-9060 for sampling.
2006 PLX Technology, Inc. All rights reserved. PLX and the PLX logo are registered trademarks of PLX Technology, Inc. ExpressLane is a trademark of PLX Technology, Inc., which may be registered in some jurisdiction. All other product names that appear in this material are for identification purposes only and are acknowledged to be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies. Information supplied by PLX is believed to be accurate and reliable, but PLX Technology, Inc. assumes no responsibility for any errors that may appear in this material. PLX Technology, Inc. reserves the right, without notice, to make changes in product design or specification.

PCI8508-SIL-PB-P1-1.7
05/07

Notice: we do not provide any warranties that information, datasheets, application notes, circuit diagrams, or software stored on this website are up-to-date or error free. The archived PEX8508-AC25BI G Datasheet file may be downloaded here without warranties.

Datasheet ID: PEX8508-AC25BI G 520502