New PCIe® 6.0 PECFF Emulation Platform Hardware Demonstration
This video, from the AI Hardware Summit, shows a prototypical Gen-Z PECFF demonstration based on PCIe 6.0, at 64 GT/s.
It shows PCB connectors and twinax cable systems, with performance capabilities eminently suitable for AI hardware applications.
It’s a Gen-Z backplane with Gen-Z Add-In-Cards (AIC) with top card connectivity. This emulates industry standard AI Acceleration hardware platforms.
It’s a configurable, scalable system featuring high-speed cable assemblies, high-speed edge card connectors, and precision RF interconnects.
What’s Going On
The Synopsys 6.0 PHY generates up to four 64 GT/s PAM4 differential signals. This is PCIe GEN 6 data rates.
The differential pairs route through an Isola Tachyon 100 G test board, to a Samtec 70 GHz Bulls Eye® High-Performance Test System cable assembly, the BE-70A Series.
The signal travels from the Bulls Eye connector, through 6″ (15.24 cm) of low-loss coax cable, to Samtec 2.40 mm precision RF connectors, then to a rigid backplane comprised of Samtec HSEC6-DV micro edge card connectors.
64 GT/s PAM4 data passes from the riser cards, through the backplane, to a second riser card, then back through Samtec precision RF connectors and back to the Bulls Eye test point system. The product shown in this video is the ARF6, ARC6 AcceleRate® cable system.
64 GT/s PAM4 signals can also route through top card connectivity via Samtec Eye Speed Ultra-Low skew twinax cable assemblies.
Results
The results are excellent. We see a total insertion loss of over -36 dB, with Pre-FEC bit error rates (BER) in the order of 1e-7. The eyes are wide-open, and as seen in the histogram, the separation is excellent.
Questions?
This demonstration shows that Samtec Flyover technology and high-speed interconnect systems can effectively operate in 64 GT/s platforms that incorporate multiple riser cards that include PCI Express 6.0 AI, ML usage models.
If you have any questions about this demo, please contact us at [email protected].
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