PEX9797 Datasheet, PDF (1/3 Pages) AVAGO TECHNOLOGIES LIMITED – Managed PCI Express Switches Based on ExpressFabric

PEX9700 Series Switch Chips
Managed PCI Express Switches Based on ExpressFabric® Technology
Product Brief
General Features
■■ State-of-the-art switch fabric
––­Sharing I/Os among multiple hosts
––Host-to-host DMA
––Low latency TWC
■■ Any port can be a host port or
Downstream (device) Port
■■ Works with standard PCIe end-points
and hosts – and software, as well as
with existing application software
■■ MSI-X support
■■ Allows flexible fabric topologies
Key Advantages
■■ PCI Express Switches
––­12 to 97 Lanes with Integrated
on-chip SerDes
––5 to 25 Independent ports
––Designate any Port as the
Upstream Port
––Low-power SerDes (under 90 mW
per Lane)
––Device-Specific Relaxed Ordering
––Port configuration
––Dedicated management port
for mCPU
––x4, x8, or x16, depending on Port
configuration; x4 can down-train to
x1 and x2 width
––Configurable through serial EEPROM,
I2C, SMBus, and/or Host port
■■ Standards Compliant
––­PCI Express Base Specification, r3.1
(backward compatible w/ PCIe r2.0,
& r1.0a/1.1)
––PCI Power Management Spec, r1.2
■■ High Performance
––Full line rate on all ports
––Cut-Thru packet latency of less than
150ns (x16 to x16)
––2KB Max Payload Size
––Multicast through DMA
Converge Servers and IO controllers with PCIe
n _{Create cost-effective high-availability hyperscale systems}
by enabling communication between in-rack hosts and
endpoints using PCIe
n _{Simplify connectivity while providing the highest PCIe}
switching performance available for data center servers,
storage, and networks
n _{Reduce latency, system complexity, and power consumption}
by up to 50% in data-intensive environments
n _{Take advantage of industry-first features for most demanding}
hyper-converged, NVMe and rack scale systems
Avago PEX9700 switches allow customers to build high performance,
low latency, scalable, cost-effective PCI Express-based fabrics. The
switches enable I/O sharing with standard SR-IOV or multifunction capability, allowing multiple hosts
or Nodes to reside on a single PCIe-based network. Hosts communicate through Ethernet-like DMA
(NIC DMA) with other hosts and end-points using application software. Hosts may also communicate
using Tunneled Window Connection (TWC), a special low latency host-to-host communication
capability for short packets.
Shared I/O Using Standards
PEX9700 switches allow the Virtual Functions (VFs) of SRIOV endpoints (such as an Avago
MegaRAID® SAS controller) to be shared and assigned to multiple hosts concurrently. Each host
can enumerate its assigned functions using standard BIOS and OS software and use them with
unmodified vendor-supplied drivers. The use of standard system software minimizes software
support costs.
General Purpose Host-to-Host DMA
Ethernet is used almost universally for server to server communications. PEX9700 switches
contain a virtual Ethernet NIC at each host port that allows Ethernet to be tunneled transparently
through the fabric to any and all servers that are connected. Internal Ethernet communications
using virtual Ethernet NICs and NIC DMA are complemented by the ability to share a physical
SRIOV NIC, thus providing compatibility with the vast library of applications that leverage
Ethernet communications.
Software-Defined Fabric
The switches are built on a hybrid hardware/software platform that offers high configurability and
flexibility in regards to the number of hosts, end-points, and PCIe slots. The critical pathways have
direct hardware support, enabling the fabric to offer non-blocking, line speed performance with
features such as I/O sharing and DMA. The solution is completed by management processor that
communicates with platform management via API and/or CLI. The solution offers an innovative
approach to setup and control, making use of an off-chip management CPU (mCPU) to initialize
the PEX9700 switch, configure the routing tables, handle errors, Hot-Plug events, and enable the
solution to extend the capabilities without modifying the system software.