PCIe
PCIe
PCI Express (PCIe) is a high speed serial interconnect meant to simplify and replace many internal PC buses. As data rates have risen, traditional parallel buses such as PCI have suffered due to data synchronization problems. Large parallel buses also take a lot of board real estate. PCI Express solves these issues by using high speed serial links, called lanes. PCI Express allows up to 32 lanes, with each lane transferring data at up to 500 MB/s full duplex for a total of 16GB/s throughput. PCIe transfers data at 250 MiB/s per channel?up to?16 channels and a transfer rate of 4 GB/s and 250 MB/s.
PCIe is based on the current PCI system, with the main change in the physical layer. This means that systems can be upgraded to PCI Express without the need for software changes. The PCIe physical layer is much like that of Ethernet, and allows for a single switching unit to control all transactions between PC components much more efficiently than legacy bus architectures.
The serial nature of PCIe also allows for smaller form factor peripherals such as miniCard. A miniCard is half the size of a standard miniPCI card. The miniCard form factor is ideal for notebooks and mobile devices where space is at a premium.
PCIe is the major new PC backplane standard, designed to be completely transparent to software developers, enabling smaller form factors and enhanced performance required for today's WLAN applications.
Ralink supports PCIe interfaces with the following chipset solutions: See right for product briefs
RT2800E
RT2800ED
Resources
Product Briefs
|
