Philips and Xilinx demonstrated a programmable PCI Express endpoint silicon solution costs less than $15.00 USD in high volumes. PCI Express is a point-to-point serial connection that offers a 2.5 to 80 Gigabit transfer rate. Comprised of the Philips PX1011A PCI Express PHY and a Xilinx Spartan-3-based FPGA with an Xilinx PCI Express LogiCORE IP core, the Philips-Xilinx PCI Express offering can be used in applications including add-in cards, host bus adapters, graphics cards and high-end servers. The solution is fully compliant to the PCI Express 1.0a specification. This solution includes the Philips PCI Express PHY that delivers the SERDES serializer / deserializer and the Physical Coding Sub-Layer (PCS). The Xilinx 90nm Spartan-3 FPGA portion features an combination of block and distributed RAM, up to 784 I/Os, MicroBlaze 32-bit RISC soft processors and embedded XtremeDSP functionality.
Pricing and Availability
The Philips PX1011A-EL1 PCI Express PHY will start sampling this month, with general availability in June and is priced at less than $5.50 in high volumes. The Xilinx XC3S1200E device with 1.2 million system gates is available for under $9.00 (500K volumes, second half 2006) in high volume. The PCI Express LogiCORE IP core, DO-DI-PCIE-PIPE, is priced at $14,000
