Soft Mixed Signal Corporation Announces PCI-Express PHY IP

PCI-Express PHY IP Compliant to PCI-Express Base Specification Revision 1.0a and PIPE (Physical Interface for PCI-Express) Specifications

Santa Clara, Calif. – Monday, October 25, 2004 – Soft Mixed Signal Corporation, today announced availability of its scalable, low-power PCI-Express PHY IP compliant with PCI-Express Base and PIPE specifications.
 
The 0.18µm PHY (Physical Layer) is a full PIPE compliant Transceiver, includes fully integrated clock synthesis and can be intelligently scaled to support power-efficient multi-lane applications.   SMS PCI-Express PHY IP implementations for 0.13µm processes are also being readied. SMS PCI-Express PHY interoperates with multiple Link & Transport Layer IP Blocks available from IP Vendors. SMS PCI Express PHY includes PMA and PCS layers of the PCI-Express Networking Layers and interfaces with the MAC layer through a PIPE interface which can be configured as 8 or 16 bit.
 
PCI-Express, developed and managed by the PCI Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG), is an industry standard high-performance, general-purpose, serial 3rd generation interconnect technology designed for use in enterprise, desktop, mobile and communications platforms in coexistence with PCI and PCI-X standards. “PCI-Express has seen wide acceptance and a vast majority of PCs are expected to adopt it next year” said the Soft Mixed Signal President Omer Kal. “Also with the small form factor standards, PCI Express is poised to become the high speed interconnect interface of choice for mobile systems in addition to being the prominent back-plane and interconnect bus standard for new architectures such as Advanced Switching Interconnect (ASI).”

Salient advantages SMS PCI-Express PHY IP provides are:  Smallest die size available, Proprietary modular multi-lane implementation methodology that allows for most efficient silicon area utilization, Proprietary Clock recovery architecture that provides unprecedented robustness against noisy environments present in today’s multi-million gate Integrated Circuits.
 
In addition to SMS PCI Express PHY IP, Soft Mixed Signal Corporation provides extensive customer support in terms of ASIC / SOC integration guidelines, full verification environment to ensure a compliant implementation and full system modeling solutions, including technical support for wide variety of packaging options, increase the ease of integrating the PHY IP into the customers simulation environment.

Soft Mixed Signal’s PCI Express IP complements the company’s Serial ATA (SATA) and High-Speed USB PHY IP’s for Connectivity cores in an environment where all interfaces in PC, Consumer and Storage applications are moving to high speed Serial Interfaces.

About Soft Mixed Signal Corporation  
Founded in 1995, Soft Mixed Signal Corporation (SMS) is a leading semiconductor intellectual property company offering innovative solutions for LAN, WAN and high-speed connectivity markets. Headquartered in Santa Clara, California, SMS develops and offers system level PHY (Physical Layer) / Transceiver Semiconductor IC solutions for LAN, WAN, SAN/Connectivity markets utilizing proprietary mixed signal and digital signal processing (DSP) technologies These include LAN: Fast (100Base-T), Gigabit (Fiber or Copper), 10Gigabit Ethernet; WAN: SONET (OC-3, OC-12, OC-48); SAN/Connectivity: Fiber-Channel, PCI-Express, USB2.0, NPFI/SPI 4.2 PHY.
Soft Mixed Signal Corporation is a member of the Developer Network for PCI Express which can be accessed at www.pciexpressdevnet.org.
Soft Mixed Signal Corporation can be reached on the Internet at www.softmixedsignal.com