Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Hi, there. My name is Ron Wade, Technical Marketing Manager in the Timing and Synchronization
Division of IDT. I'm going to give you a quick overview of our brand new ultra low power
PCI Express Timing Solutions family.
So, PCI Express can be thought of as having three generations of timing parts. The original
technology was 3.3 volt HCSL output structure, which was developed in the early 2000's. For
comparison sake here I'm taking an eight output clock generator from each technology. You
can see that in this case the 3.3 volt HCSL which is the yellow and black burns 580 milliwatts
of power to give you an eight output clock generator. In the mid 2000's, we developed
a low-power HCSL output for use in notebook PC's, and normalizing to an eight output clock
generator, that technology was able to provide a reduced power consumption of 165 milliwatts.
What we're introducing today is an ultra low power PCI Express family and again, an eight
output clock generator using the 9FGV or 9DBV devices which are the blue and white can give
you that PCI Express Gen1, two, three clock generator for as little as 57 milliwatts.
You can see that as we're decreasing the power here significantly we're also still providing
you with the PCI Express Gen1 to Gen2 to Gen3 capability.
So, the ultra low power PCI Express family consists of three main building blocks. There's
the clock generators, there's the clock buffers, which are both fanout mode and zero delay,
and the clock multiplexers, which have a single output or they have integrated fanout. The
ultra low power PCI Express family part numbers all kind of play together and hang together
and once you figure out the decoder ring, which is really simple here, you can kind
of figure out what kind of part you need to plop into your design without any complicated
selector guides. So, the FGV parts for the clock generators, FG stands for frequency
generator. The DBV parts are the clock buffers. DV stands for differential buffer. The DMV
parts are the clock multiplexers, which stands for differential multiplexers and the V indicates
1.8 volt operation. The first two digits are the V are the number of outputs, which currently
range from two to eight, but will eventually range from one to ten. The 31 series parts
have external terminations. The 41 series parts have a 100 ohm differential output termination
and the 51 series parts have an 85 ohm output termination, to support the newer practices
in PCI Express. So, devices with the first six characters in the part number say, 9FGV0831
or 41 or 51 are all compatible with each other except for that difference in the output terminations.
For parts that have the same number of outputs whether it's a buffer or a clock generator,
the output side of the part is identical between them. So, an 831 clock generator and a 831
buffer, the top, the right side and the bottom of the parts are all the same pin out which
makes it easy to switch from one to the other in co-layout.
So, the clocks as mentioned, the main functions are the buffers in the clock generators. These
are 1.8 volt operation for the absolute lowest power consumption. We did do a lot of work
to actually reduce the current required and these devices do actually draw less current
than the yellow and the green technology parts that I'd mentioned previously. So, again,
the outputs are two to eight today. They are low power HCSL which to the receiver looks
exactly the same as the kind of legacy HCSL technology. The benefit here is that the current
per output drops from 15 milliamps down to five and then we have the ability to integrate
or have external the termination resistors. The other key thing we have is you may not
have an SM bus handy and you don't need an SM bus to control the basic functions of the
parts. The clock generator, for instance, there's a spread enable pin that enables you
to have not only spread off, but to have a quarter percent down spread or half a percent
down spread as a pin selection. Likewise, the buffers have a pin that allows you to
select either high or low bandwidth or a bypass mode, which is a fanout with the PLL, as the
name implies, bypassed and turned off. Also, the device that synthesizers have, two selectable
SM bus addresses so that you can use up to two of them on the same segment. Most of the
fanout buffers have three selectable SM bus addresses so that up to three of those devices
can be used on the same SM bus segment and the buffers in the synthesizer addresses do
not overlap. It's very easy to have up to five of these devices on the same segment
without any external logic. All the parts are pre-production right now, samples are
available now and will be in full production by the end of September.
A typical application for these is an embedded communications adapter where you've got a
PCI Express switch, PCI Express IO, a CPU chip set or an FPGA and various peripherals
in memory and performance requirements are from Gen1 to Gen2, going to Gen3. These parts
cover the whole gambit of that performance envelope. The other thing in these types of
applications as you cram more and more functionality in the same space as board real estate becomes
very tight. Also, power densities continue to grow and as the power density grows, then
thermal concerns tend to show up as well. So, these parts are available in commercial
and industrial temperature ranges. They have a very low thermal profile and they are very
small package-wise. Package comparison, not including the external termination resistors
and not including the leads of the packages is shown here, where the original yellow parts
are the T-SOP and SOIC-type packages. The blue boxes are the QFN's at the 9DBV and FGV
parts come in. At the eight output level, a six by six millimeter QFN is significantly
smaller than the original 48 pin T-SOP used by the eight output parts in the 3.3 volt
HCSL range.
Key applications, again, these parts are very much at home in cloud computing and in networking
and storage. They're finding a very nice reception in PCI Express-based solid state drives due
to their thermal characteristics, i.e. low power, pixie instrumentation, multi-function
printers and basically anywhere where you need PC Express Gen1, 2, 3 with a very low
power footprint.
The key benefits of the ultra low power PCI Express or certainly the power consumption,
it's less than one-tenth of the comparable function in the original 3.3 volt HCSL technology.
Lower power consumption directly translates into lower operating cost. And using a benchmark
of one watt cost 86 cents per year in a data center for not only the powering of the device,
but the cooling of the device. Saving one watt saves 86 cents a year. So, going from
an eight output yellow synthesizer to an eight output blue synthesizer results in 45 cents
a year in reduced energy cost. These devices are PCI Express Gen1, 2, 3, which means that
you can reuse the same device through multiple generations of your product. They're a small
form factor. They're a four by four to six by six millimeters QFN's today. We will have
a three by three for some of the very small parts in the near future. They have high integration.
We have integrated output terminations for those environments where you're driving a
homogeneous type of transmission line. In other words, all the transmissions lines are
100 ohm or 85 ohm. We also offer it without the internal terminations for cases where
you may need to terminate to different types of loads. The ref on the synthesizers or the
clock generators is a copy of the crystal and it is less than 1.5 picoseconds RMS phase
jitter which means that it is suitable for gigabit Ethernet, which adds more integration
capability to this device for your design.
I'm not going to spend too much time on these slides. You can view these at your leisure.
The clock generator family as it exists today, on August, 20, 2012 is shown here, where we
segregate the number of outputs and basically allow you to pick your device based on your
particular application requirements. Then likewise, the differential buffer family features
are shown here where you've got the number of outputs, the number of OE pins, et cetera,
end count, et cetera, et cetera, and schedule for the parts.
In closing, I'd like to mention you can go to www.IDT.com for additional information
and I would like to extend a very warm thank you for taking time to learn about IDT's ultra
low power PCI Express Timing Solutions.