New PCIe Gen 4 Over-Fiber Adapter Card

With the recent introduction of PCIe^® Gen 4 servers and engineering work stations, designers require faster optical links for networking and accelerator interfaces. Samtec’s new PCIe Gen 4 adapter card doubles the speed over the Gen 3 card and easily plugs into any PCIe slot.

Giri Tumu, Samtec’s Optics Application Engineer, walks us through a live demonstration of our latest Gen 4 optical PCIe product.

The demo includes a PCIe Gen 4 server and a Non-Disruptive Migration (NDM) storage end point that’s connected to a 100 meter OM4 fiber.

The adapter card was developed by our partner Dolphin. The optical magic itself comes from Samtec’s FireFly™ optical modules. One of the new features of the adapter card is the capability to do a surprise hard-add. A surprise hard-add allows designers to add a new transferring device to an already-running system. This allows new resources to be added and be immediately available without shutting down the network.

The Samtec adapter card is the PCOA series. It utilizes Samtec’s PCUO FireFly optical cable assemblies, it supports PCIe Gen 3/4 platforms, is available in x16, x8, dual x8, x4, dual x4 and quad x4 configurations, and is available with transparent or non-transparent bridging.

The second half of the video features Herman Paraison, VP of Sales and Marketing, with our partner Dolphin. Herman share details on the features and performance of the new adapter card.

The Dolphin products are the MXH942 PCIe Transparent Host and Target Cable Adapter, and the MXH940 PCIe x16 NTB Host Adapter.

Here’s a link if you want more information about Samtec PCIe products. Feel free to contact us at if we can answer any questions.

BTW, the PCUO FireFly optical cable assembly meets PCI Gen 3 and Gen 4 specs, and transmits signals up to 100 meters.

And finally, speaking of PCIe, here’s a summary of a recent Samtec gEEk spEEk presentation that may interest you: PCI Express: Is 85 Ohms Really Needed?