By Richard Solomon, PCI-SIG Vice President and Developers Conference Chair

Another PCI-SIG Developers Conference has come and gone, and we had a whopping 600+ member company attendees at this year’s event in Santa Clara. Event highlights included technical experts sharing their PCI Express knowledge, an exhibit hall and technology showcase, as well as exciting specification announcements (PCI Express 6.0, anyone?).

Though I can’t pick my favorite part of this event, I can’t hide my excitement about the new specification announcements that PCI-SIG has coming down the pipeline. Heading into DevCon, we had just unveiled the PCI Express 5.0 specification in May. At our annual press conference, we were pleased to announce the upcoming PCI Express 6.0 specification. The PCIe 6.0 specification will not only reach 64GT/s transfer rates but also include PAM-4 encoding and maintain backwards compatibility with previous specs. The specification is targeted for release in 2021, and in the meantime, we will continue to see products leveraging PCIe 4.0 and PCIe 5.0 architectures entering the market.  

In addition to the buzz surrounding the PCIe 6.0 architecture announcement, we had a PCI Express Technology Showcase. Member companies showed off their PCIe 4.0 and PCIe 5.0 solutions in the exhibit hall. Attendees were able to check out the products while viewing detailed product information.

Another cornerstone of the PCI-SIG DevCon is member education. Members hosted multiple technical sessions each day that focused on various aspects of PCI Express specifications, implementation best practices, pitfalls and more. During this DevCon, I gave an overview of PCI-SIG architecture, shared PCI Express basics and PCIe architectures for chip-to-chip interconnects. Presentation slides from these sessions will be available to members via the Training Event Resources page. Outside of these sessions, a few technical experts—myself included—shared their insights for the next iteration of our educational video series that will soon be uploaded to the PCI-SIG YouTube channel.  

Finally, I want to extend my gratitude to our event sponsors: Anritsu, Cadence, Keysight, Mentor Graphics, Mobiveil, PLDA, Samtec, Synopsys, Tektronix and Teledyne LeCroy. I would also like to thank our 800+ member companies for their ongoing contributions and support. We are at a ten-year membership high and plan to continue this upward trajectory.

If you’re a PCI-SIG member and weren’t able to attend the PCI-SIG Developers Conference, we would love to see you at the upcoming PCI-SIG DevCons in Israel, Europe and APAC. If you’re not a member and feel like you are missing out, you might want to consider joining PCI-SIG.

Thanks to all attendees and sponsors for making PCI-SIG Developers Conference 2019 such a spectacular event!