PCI-SIG in 2018: A Year in Review

By Kurt Lender, Marketing Work Group Co-Chair, PCI-SIG

I’m happy to share that 2018 has been another productive year for PCI-SIG. In addition to significant progress in our specification development and compliance work, we also continued to provide educational resources to our members and the industry. Below are my top 7 highlights from this year.

  1. The top highlight of the year was seeing PCIe 5.0 enter its final stages before official release. We were proud to announce earlier this month that PCIe 5.0, Version 0.9 is now available to members. This is a great step towards doubling bandwidth to 32 GT/s while maintaining back backward compatibility with previous generations of PCIe technology. The final specification is anticipated to be released in Q1 2019.
  2. The recent PCI-SIG Compliance Workshop #108 included the first round of PCIe 4.0 FYI testing, which promises that official testing will begin soon and add PCIe 4.0 compliant products to our Integrators List.
  3. We announced a new liaison with the SD Association alongside its introduction of the SD Express Card, which utilizes PCIe 3.0 technology and delivers transfer rates up to 985 megabytes per second (MB/s). Devices ranging from mobile phones and laptops to data-demanding IoT products, will benefit from the faster, scalable storage of SD Express.
  4. We created our first series of educational videos on important topics like a deep dive in low power features and an overview of our PCI-SIG Compliance Program. View the whole video series on our YouTube channel.
  5. Our members presented at leading industry events. At the OCP Summit, PCI-SIG President Al Yanes presented on how PCI Express is delivering the appropriate bandwidth needed for HPC. PCI-SIG Marketing Workgroup member Justin Wenck presented at Flash Memory Summit, where he discussed everything from PCIe’s low power features to the various form factors.
  6. We also held our annual members-only Developer Conferences at locations around the world; from Santa Clara  to Israel to Tokyo to Taiwan and even returned to Munich. The events were another excellent vehicle for networking and educating members on the latest PCI Express technology developments. Members can view the presentation slides on Causeway.
  7. The Marketing Working Group launched our first social media channels to provide up to the minute updates on PCI-SIG news. I invite you to engage with us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

I’m looking forward to continued progress in 2019, and would like to wish everyone a happy holiday season.