At this week's DesignCon in Santa Clara, California, Nubis Communications and Alphawave Semi demonstrated PCI Express 6.0 over an optical link at 64GT/s per lane.
In the demo, the Alphawave Semi PCIe Subsystem with PiCORE Controller IP and PipeCORE PHY directly drives and receives PCIe 6.0 traffic through a Nubis XT1600 linear optical engine over a PCIe 6.0 optical link at 64GT/s per fiber. Optical output waveform was measured on a Tektronix sampling scope with a high-speed optical probe. The demo was staged at the Tektronix booth.
The Nubis XT1600 optical engine supports up to 16 lanes of high-density PCIe Gen 6.0 or 100 Gbps/lane Ethernet optical connectivity without incorporating retimers.
PCIe over optics could be used togreatly expand the reach and flexibility of the interconnect for memory, CPUs, GPUs, and custom silicon accelerators.
“Our high level of integration with 16 lanes full-duplex in a single low-power, low-latency optical engine is a great match to the maximum bandwidth of PCIe x16 for next-generation compute and storage deployments,” said Scott Schube, VP of Marketing at Nubis Communications. “Our demonstration of the Nubis XT1600 linear optical engine and Alphawave Semi’s PCIe 6.0 Controller and PHY IP showcases the viability of a PCIe® 6.0 x8 link over optical fiber at 64 GT/s.”
“AI applications are reshaping data center networks, with hyperscalers deploying increasingly large clusters of disaggregated servers distributed over longer distances. This shift has generated heightened interest in PCIe over Optics among several of our customers,” said Tony Chan Carusone, CTO at Alphawave Semi. “Through our collaboration with Nubis, we’re pleased to demonstrate how we’re leveraging Alphawave Semi’s leadership in connectivity IP and silicon to enable PCIe optical connectivity solutions that accelerate high-performance AI computing and data infrastructure.”
