By Al Yanes, PCI-SIG President and Board Chair

For the past 30 years, PCI-SIG^® has been at the forefront of technology innovation. Our PCI Express^® (PCIe^®) specification has maintained its position as the established de-facto interconnect of choice and a crucial component of the compute continuum. At the PCI-SIG Developers Conference 2022, we celebrated our 30-year anniversary with the announcement of the next evolution of PCIe technology: PCIe 7.0 specification. The forthcoming PCIe 7.0 specification is planned to once again deliver a speed increase in three years, expanding the data rate of the recently released PCIe 6.0 specification to 128 GT/s. The PCIe 7.0 specification is targeted for release to members in 2025.

PCI-SIG technical workgroups will be developing the PCIe 7.0 specification with the following feature goals:

• Delivering 128 GT/s raw bit rate and up to 512 GB/s bi-directionally via x16 configuration
• Utilizing PAM4 (Pulse Amplitude Modulation with 4 levels) signaling
• Focusing on the channel parameters and reach
• Continuing to deliver the low-latency and high-reliability targets
• Improving power efficiency
• Maintaining backwards compatibility with all previous generations of PCIe technology

Companies planning their roadmaps can include the next generation of PCIe technology with the assurance that it will meet their needs for a reliable, high-speed, low latency I/O interconnect. PCIe 7.0 technology will expand the PCI-SIG roadmap to include data-intensive applications and markets, including 800 Gig Ethernet, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML), High Performance Computing (HPC), Quantum Computing, Hyperscale Data Centers and Cloud.

For additional information on the upcoming PCIe 7.0 specification, please review the website FAQ.