Microsemi, a major provider of semiconductor solutions, announced the availability of its new Switchtec PAX advanced fabric Gen3 PCIe switch, designed to provide high-performance fabric connectivity for scalable, multi-host systems and just a bunch of flash (JBOF) and supporting single root input/output (I/O) virtualisation (SR-IOV), NVMe and multi-function endpoints.
Microsemi noted that hyperconverged systems are shifting towards composable/disaggregated infrastructures (C/DI) such as rack scale architecture to meet the changing demands on resources and storage capacity of next-generation applications. PAX advanced fabric PCIe switches are designed to provide a scalable, low latency and cost-effective solution to the disaggregation of computing, networking, graphics processing units (GPUs) and storage resources.
The new PAX PCIe switches, which are flexibly interconnected with configurable high-speed fabric links, virtualise PCIe domains and SR-IOV endpoints. System development is simplified through a fabric application programming interface (API) and the ability to utilise off-the-shelf NVMe host drivers, reducing time-to-market for complex multi-host systems.
Microsemi’s Switchtec PAX family features switches supporting from 96 lanes to 24 lanes and up to 48 ports, offering capabilities including:
1. PCIe fabric connectivity to address the limitations of the PCIe specification for rack scale multi-host systems.
2. Multi-host sharing of SR-IOV and multifunction endpoints.
3. Virtualisation of PCIe domains and SR-IOV NVMe SSDs, plus software development kit (SDK) for virtualisation of other SR-IOV endpoints and enclosure management.
4. Flexible port bifurcation, enabling from x2 to x16 lanes per port.
5. Advanced diagnostics and debug features to identify, diagnose and fix problems.
6. Separate Refclk Independent SSC (SRIS) for cabled PCIe and lower cost system designs.
Microsemi’s PCIe product portfolio includes the scalable, low power PFX family of PCIe Gen3 fanout switches, the programmable PSX family of PCIe Gen3 storage switches and the multi-protocol, adaptive EQNOX family of signal conditioners with FlexEQ equalisation technology supporting PCIe Gen3 and Gen2.
