By Al Yanes, PCI-SIG President and Chairman

I am happy to share that PCI-SIG® has begun developing the PCI Express® (PCIe®) 6.0 specification, targeted for release in 2021. The new specification is blazing the trail for interconnect technology as one of the first applications to reach 64GT/s transfer rates. PCIe 6.0 architecture will double the data rate of PCIe 5.0 architecture while maintaining backwards compatibility with previous generations.

Increased bandwidth rates continue to rise, technology demands shift, and our organization works to support the needs of various markets—indicated by our May 2019, PCIe 5.0 specification release. Building on this technology even further, PCI Express 6.0 technology greatly impacts a range of markets such as Artificial Intelligence, Communication Systems, High-Performance Computing, Machine Learning, Networking and Storage.

PCIe 6.0 Specification Features:

• Delivers 64 GT/s raw bit rate and up to 256 GB/s via x16 configuration 
• Utilizes PAM-4 (Pulse Amplitude Modulation with 4 levels) encoding and leverages existing 56G PAM-4 in the industry
• Includes low-latency Forward Error Correction (FEC) with additional mechanisms to improve bandwidth efficiency
• Maintains backwards compatibility with all previous generations of PCIe technology

While the PCI Express 6.0 specification evolves, previous generations are making the headlines. PCIe 4.0 technology has been adopted by many companies and formal compliance testing begins in Q3 2019. Companies are beginning to develop products utilizing PCIe 5.0 technology and PCI-SIG is developing a formal testing portion for our compliance workshops.

I want to thank our member companies for their ongoing commitment to PCI-SIG. Thanks to their contribution we are able to double the bandwidth yet again in a timely manner.

For more information on the PCI Express 6.0 specification:

• Read the PCI Express 6.0 press release

Visit our website at https://pcisig.com/ to learn more about how you can become a member and help shape the future of the upcoming PCIe 6.0 specification.