Cabled PCI Express

The name used by PCI-SIG (PCI Special Interest Group) is PCI Express External Cabling. The most commonly used name is External PCI Express (28400 Google-hits, 2008-03) or shortned External PCIe. Another name used is Cabled PCI Express (2400 Google-hits, 2008-03) or shortned Cabled PCIe.

The PCI Express External Cabling 1.0 Specification, released by PCI-SIG in February 2007, extends PCI Express “outside the box”. It establishes a standard method of using PCI Express over a cable by defining cable connectors, copper cabling attributes and electrical characteristics, connector retention, identification and labeling.

*It conforms to the PCI Express 1.1 Base and electromechanical specifications, enabling high data rates between PCI Express subsystems.

*Standard cables and connectors have been defined for x1, x4, x8 and x16 links (pronounced “by one,” “by four” and so on).

*The cable provides sideband signaling to maintain compatibility with existing silicon and software.

*The cabled PCI Express specification offers guidelines for a practical cable length but does not currently set a maximum cable distance.

External links

* [http://uk.farnell.com/images/en/ede/pdf/PCIe_350.pdf External PCI Express (PCIe) x1, x4, x8, x16 I/O Products] (contains pictures of connectors and tables with the pinout on the last two pages)

References

# PCI-SIG http://www.pcisig.com/home
# PCI Express External Cabling 1.0 Specification http://www.pcisig.com/specifications/pciexpress/pcie_cabling1.0/
# PCI Express External Cabling 1.0 Press Release http://www.pcisig.com/news_room/news/press_release/02_07_07
# Murali Ravindran, Cabled PCI Express- A Standard High Speed Instrument Interconnect. IEEE AUTOTESTCON 2007
# Murali Ravindran, Cabled PCI Express for Measurement Applications. Evaluation Engineering October 2007
# Murali Ravindran, The technology driving Instrumentation 2.0—PCI Express. Test & Measurement World http://www.tmworld.com/article/CA6456168.html