I/O

Microchip is entering the market for PCIe retimer chips with a pair of new retimers supporting PCIe 5.0's 32GT/s link speed. The new XpressConnect RTM-C 8xG5 and 16xG5 chips extend the reach of PCIe signals while adding less than 10ns of latency. As PCIe speeds have increased, the practical range of PCIe signals across a circuit board has decreased, requiring servers to start including PCIe signal repeaters. For PCIe gen3, mostly-analog redriver chips were often sufficient to amplify signals. With PCIe gen4 and especially gen5, the repeaters have to be retimers that operate in the digital domain, recovering the clock and data from the input signal with awareness of the PCIe protocol to re-transmit a clean copy of the original signal. Without retimers, PCIe gen5...