NEC Electronics expands PCI Express ASSP family with availability of new single-port Bridge Device

PCI Express to Single-Port PCI/PCI-X Bridge Offers Low Power and Very Small Form Factor

NEC Electronics Europe today announced availability of samples for a new single-port PCI Express® bridge application-specific standard product (ASSP) to help facilitate the transition to emerging PCI Express technology.  This latest member of NEC Electronics’ growing portfolio of PCI Express semiconductor solutions is a standard device designed to meet the industry’s growing demand for high-speed interface technology in servers, workstations, graphics equipment and other storage- and network-related applications. The uPD720404 ASSP serves as a bridge to any native PCI®/PCI-X® device, thereby enabling compatibility among previous generations of PCI standards and the emerging PCI Express standard. The new device offers designers working in the networking and storage industries a proven, low-power, high-speed interface with a very small form factor.

“Bandwidth consumption in the networking and enterprise markets is on the rise, and designers working with these types of applications are turning to high-performance serial interface technologies such as PCI Express to accommodate the demand efficiently and cost-effectively,” said Kugao Ouchi, general manager, digital consumer and connectivity strategic business unit, NEC Electronics America. “As a leading provider of PCI Express solutions, NEC Electronics America is committed to further developing this technology and providing customers with proven interface solutions. We are pleased to announce this new low-power, small-package ASSP that will help designers achieve seamless transitions to high-performance PCI Express technology in new and existing designs for their enterprise, storage and networking applications.”

 The uPD720404 ASSP supports x4 PCI Express lanes in a single PCI/PCI-X domain, and operates at 133-megahertz (MHz) in single data rate PCI-X mode and 66 MHz in 64-bit PCI mode.  In addition to a low power consumption level that eliminates the need for heat sinks, the bridge ASSP has a dual power supply and requires no special power-up sequencing. The bridge ASSP also supports advanced error reporting and advanced system power management. In addition, the uPD720404 ASSP comes in a very small package that allows designers to fit it into low profile cards (LPCs) that have a height of 64.41 millimeters (mm). The standard PCI form factor has a height of 106.88 mm.

More information about NEC Electronics’ PCI Express products can be found at www.am.necel.com/pciexpress.

NEC Electronics’ PCI Express ASSPs and IP Solutions
PCI Express is a third-generation, scalable input/output (I/O) architecture for use in desktop, mobile, server, communication platform, workstation and embedded devices. As PC and server CPUs and other I/O devices increase in speed, technologies such as PCI Express are needed to ensure that I/O interfaces do not create performance bottlenecks in systems. NEC Electronics' PCI Express ASSPs are compliant with revisions 1.0a and 1.1 of the PCI Express base specification. NEC Electronics’ PCI Express IP solutions include transceiver and generic controller cores based on a data link and transaction layer architecture that enables data transfers to the switch fabric, physical logic layers based on NEC Electronics’ serializer/deserializer (SerDes) technology, and link layer cores. NEC Electronics was the first company to demonstrate a PCI Express PHY chip and endpoint controller core in 2002.

Availability
Samples of NEC Electronics’ uPD720404 bridge ASSP are available now. Mass production is scheduled to begin in Q3 2006. Availability is subject to change.

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PCI Express, PCI-X, PCI and PCI-SIG are trademarks or registered trademarks of PCI-SIG. All other registered trademarks or trademarks are property of their respective owners.

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