CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
28 June 2004
Product News
Rambus and Mentor Graphics Collaborate to Offer Interoperable PCI Express* Solutions
Rambus Inc. ( http://www.rambus.com ), a developer of chip interface products and services, and Mentor Graphics announced that they are working together to develop and offer interoperable platforms for PCI Express* chip designers. This collaboration accelerates PCI Express-based system design and provides a PCI Express test environment that minimizes design risk to enable designers to focus more resources on product differentiation. In addition, Mentor Graphics and Rambus are providing more information about their intellectual property (IP) products and the joint interoperability platform in a series of design seminars that are currently being held worldwide.
As part of the joint effort, Rambus and Mentor Graphics have developed a hardware platform that consists of Rambus's RaSer PHY interface for PCI Express applications, and the Mentor Graphics® PCI Express Configurable Port. The resulting PCI Express platform supports one or four channels, each operating at 2.5 gigabits per second. The interface compatibility between the IP products was verified using Mentor Graphics' ModelSim product.
"For many designers, emerging standards like PCI Express are sometimes difficult to implement because of the lack of verified subsystems," said Dave Wood, PCI Express product line manager for the Intellectual Property division of Mentor Graphics. "Rambus is a recognized leader by being the first to provide silicon-proven PHYs and have a broad portfolio of PCI Express PHY products. Our collaboration with Rambus allows us to provide designers with a solution that is proven to interoperate across the PCI Express protocol stack and with other PCI Express systems."
The Rambus RaSer serial link interface family includes 0.18-micron, 0.13-micron and 90nanometer versions on multiple foundry processes. Rambus customers are already developing graphics, chipset, switch and bridge chips for applications using the PCI Express standard. In addition, Rambus offers its customers engineering services for chip integration, package, board and system characterization and test in order to ensure success in the development of PCI Express-based chips and boards.
The Mentor Graphics PCI Express Configurable Port includes full support for the specification for endpoint, legacy endpoint, bridges, switch, and root complex applications. The IP is designed to be very flexible with a rich set of configurable features to allow the IP to be tuned for particular applications and bandwidths. Configurable options include the number of virtual channels, the number of lanes (up to 16) and links per port (up to 4) and the maximum payload size. The IP is designed to achieve low latency (with cut-through) and enables back-to-back packets. The configurable port is also "advanced switching" ready in the data link layer.
Additional information about the Mentor Graphics-Rambus PCI Express solution can be found online at http://www.mentor.com/inventra/
For more information on the joint design seminar series, visit http://www.mentor.com/inventra/seminars/pci_express.html
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