Blistering traffic speeds: a detailed look inside PCI Express

Steve Kolokowsky and Trevor Davis, Cypress Semiconductor
Oct 24, 2005 (10:48 PM)
CommsDesign

PCI Express is an implementation of the PCI computer bus that uses existing PCI programming concepts and communications standards, based on a much faster serial communications system. In fact, PCI Express is a scalable bus that provides as little as 250Mbytes/second at a 2.5Ghz signaling rate up to 8Gbytes/second in the first spec revision. Higher bandwidths can be achieved by increasing clock speed or bus width.

This technology, like many other bus protocols, uses packets to communicate information between components. Packets are formed in the Transaction and Data Link Layers to carry information from a transmitting component to a receiving component (See Figure 1). As transmitted packets flow through each layer, they are modified to contain additional information necessary to handle packets at those layers

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