infoTECH Feature

August 19, 2008

Gennum Introduces PCI Express Bridge for High Data Rate Embedded Applications

Gennum Corporation has introduced four-lane PCI Express (PCIe)-to-local bus bridge chip. The PCIe bridge offers four lanes at 2.5Gb/s or 10Gb/s in each direction enabling designers of high-speed embedded applications to leverage the full potential of the PCIe standard with a turnkey solution and speed time to market by up to 80 percent.
 
The GN4124 PCIe bridge offers three to six times the performance over legacy bridge and endpoint products by providing 1600MB/s burst throughput and full duplex operation. This enables such capabilities as supporting multiple channels of uncompressed HD or 1080p video, thus meeting the demands of higher data rate applications in video broadcast, medical, data communications and industrial control markets. The new product is being demonstrated this week at IDF.
 
"We continue to see increased demand for higher performance PCIe solutions, beyond the traditional PC applications," said Martin Rofheart, senior vice president and GM, Analog & Mixed-Signal Products, Gennum. "With this four-lane solution, we enable designers to reduce both the cost and power dissipation of their designs, enabling a broader set of high data rate applications to quickly and easily migrate to PCIe. In short, we enable designers to spend time on their design-not spend their time and resources on making PCIe work."
 
The integrated functionality of the GN4124, which is combined with Gennum's local bus field programmable gate array (FPGA) intellectual property (IP), incorporates the PCIe physical layer and digital controller on-chip, thus eliminating the need for this functionality to be integrated into a stand-alone, complex and expensive FPGA.
 
The GN4124 is designed for a variety of PCIe applications in the communications, broadcast video, industrial control, medical and commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) markets. The widespread adoption of PCIe in these markets is driving the need for a low-cost, easy-to-implement bridging solution that fully utilizes the performance capabilities of the PCIe standard.
 
The GN4124 typically achieves 3-6x the performance of 64-bit legacy PCI solutions to enable robust multi-channel uncompressed HD video throughput, giving it performance well beyond legacy PCI. With four lanes of PCIe, the GN4124 leverages the advanced features of PCIe such as virtual channels, full-duplex operation and split transactions.
 
The throughput required to support 1080p60/50 HD video are well beyond what legacy PCI can support today, making the GN4124's support of these high-performance video rates key for emerging applications. Moreover, the GN4124 is capable of simultaneous HD video capture and playback, which is a capability that PCI solutions cannot match.
 
Don’t forget to check out TMCnet’s White paper Library, which provides a selection of in-depth information on relevant topics affecting the IP Communications industry. The library offers white papers, case studies and other documents which are free to registered users.

Niladri Sekhar Nath is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Niladri’s articles, please visit his columnist page.
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