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In recent times we have seen a trend where serial data transfers have been seen to be more widely used than parallel data transfer due to reasons of improved performance and data integrity. One example of this is the migration from PCI/PCI-X to PCI Express. A serial interface between two devices results in fewer number of pins per device package. This not only results in reduced chip and board design cost but also reduces board design complexity. As serial links can be clocked considerably faster than parallel links,  they would be  highly scalable in terms of performance.

However, to accelerate the  verification of PCI Express based sub-systems and to accelerate the PCI Express endpoint development time ,  PIPE (PHY Interface for the PCI Express Architecture) was defined by Intel and was published for industry review in the year 2002. The PIPE is a standard interface defined between a PHY sub-layer which handles the lower levels of serial signaling and the Media Access Layer (MAC)  which handles addressing/access control mechanisms. The following diagram illustrates the role PIPE plays in partitioning the PHY layer for PCI Express.

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