Lattice Semiconductor has announced that its Lattice ECP3 (economy plus third generation) FPGA family is compliant with the PCI Express 2.0 specification at 2.5Gbit/s. The FPGAs and their PCI Express IP core passed PCI-SIG PCI Express v2.0 compliance and interoperability testing for one- and four-lane configurations at a PCI-SIG workshop, ensuring that they are interoperable with existing PCI Express 2.0 supported systems. PCI Express v2.0 systems are suitable for communications, multimedia, server and mobile platforms.
The PCI Express v2.0 specification allows operation at 2.5Gbit/s, but the loop bandwidth characteristics are different and rigorous than that for PCI Express v1.1 The company says that the designers can begin the evaluation and design of PCI Express 2.0 compliant systems in its FPGAs using the IPexpress tool within the Lattice Diamond 1.2, or later, design tool suite. The IPexpress tool provides the PCI Express core, reference designs and all the scripts, and simulation models needed to streamline integration into customised designs.
