Keysight Technologies, Inc. is participating as a gold suite vendor in the industry's first PCI-SIG Compliance Workshop to help advance standards that drive interoperability between PCI Express (PCIe®) 5.0 devices. 

The event, hosted by PCI-SIG, is scheduled to be held from April 18 to 21, 2022 in Burlingame, California. PCI-SIG is a consortium that owns and manages PCI specifications as open industry standards and defines industry standard I/O (input/output) specifications consistent with the needs of its members.

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The PCIe 5.0 specification, a high-speed serial interface standard used in computer servers and graphics cards, supports greater data traffic, and bandwidth requirements in data centers. The PCI-SIG Compliance Workshop allows the industry to advance standardized test procedures, software tools and fixtures for PCIe technology-capable devices supporting data speeds of up to 32 giga transfers per second (GT/s). Consistency in PCIe specification test standards is vital to vendors of computer servers, end point devices, switches, storage devices, and compute engines as it enables them to confidently launch PCIe 5.0 technology designs that interoperate as expected with other vendors' products.

"Keysight's receiver and transmitter test solutions enable vendors to simulate, characterize, and validate interoperability between PCIe 5.0 devices used in data centers," said Dr. Joachim Peerlings, vice president of network and data center solutions at Keysight. "An active member of PCI-SIG since 1992, Keysight is pleased to participate in the first official PCI-SIG workshop focused on the PCIe 5.0 standard."

PCIe 5.0 and 6.0 interfaces underpin mass adoption of 400 Gigabit Ethernet (GE), a high-capacity data transport technology, which data center providers use to address 5G, cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, gaming, visual computing, storage, and networking applications. At the workshop, Keysight will showcase the company's recently announced PCIe 5.0 Protocol Analyzer, which combines an analyzer and interposer into one integrated design, resulting in simplified connections, and improved signal integrity.

"Interoperability between vendors' PCIe products is critical to the successful deployment of PCIe technology and we value Keysight's contributions to the development of PCIe standards," said Al Yanes, president and chairperson of PCI-SIG. "We appreciate Keysight's electrical, interconnect, protocol, and serial test solutions that enable a global ecosystem to accelerate compliance and interoperability validation."

Keysight's physical layer test solutions provide the accuracy vendors need to confidently validate PCIe 5.0 technology designs in accordance with the latest PCI-SIG specifications. These include:

  • An integrated M8040A bit error ratio tester (BERT) - a receiver test platform that supports both PCIe 5.0 specification and PAM4 interfaces and is approved by PCI-SIG for gold suite usage at 16 GT/s and now 32 GT/s.
  • Keysight's UXR-series real-time oscilloscope - offering ultra-low noise floor and high signal fidelity that allows users to confidently characterize PCIe architecture designs and accurately measure signals with bandwidths of up to 110 GHz.
  • Protocol analyzer and protocol exerciser – which operates at speeds of up to 32 GT/s and will eventually be upgraded to support 64 GT/s using the PCIe 6.0 standard in addition to supporting both PCI Express and CXL (Compute Express Link) protocols.