By Al Yanes, PCI-SIG Board Chair and President

This year has been challenging for us all and we hope that you and your families are staying healthy and safe. Despite the trials that we have faced, PCI-SIG® is adapting our events and workshops to these new times and pressing on in specification development. From ushering our Developers Conferences into the virtual age or developing modified virtual Compliance Workshops, PCI-SIG has continued to prioritize members education and engagement in 2020.

Perhaps our most exciting announcement is in a continued effort to double the bandwidth of our PCI Express® (PCIe®) specifications, PCI-SIG has officially released the PCIe 6.0 Specification, Version 0.7 to our members.

PCIe 6.0 Specification Features Overview

• A data rate of 64 GT/s speeds, doubling the 32GT/s data rate of the PCIe 5.0 specification
• A move to PAM4 (Pulse Amplitude Modulation with 4 levels) encoding
• Low-latency Forward Error Correction (FEC) with additional mechanisms to improve bandwidth efficiency
• Backwards compatibility with all previous specification generations

Explore PCIe 6.0 Technology

We have many educational resources available for both PCI-SIG members and non-members. If you haven’t yet watched it, I invite you to view Debendra Das Sharma’s highly attended PCIe 6.0 specification webinar deep dive. Because of the overwhelming support and interest this webinar received, Debendra has also developed various blogs answering audience questions on advanced specification features like PAM4, L0P and FEC.

PCI-SIG members receive additional opportunities to learn about PCIe 6.0 technology and can even influence the development of this technology through work group participation. If you would like to learn how your company can join PCI-SIG, I encourage you to visit the Become a Member page on our website.

2021 will be another thrilling year for PCIe technology with the full release of the PCIe 6.0 specification. I look forward to sharing more information on our groundbreaking new specification in the coming months.