Marvel takes PCIe to Gen 7 on 3nm

Fabless communications and computing chip company Marvell Technology Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.) has demonstrated PCIe Gen 7 connectivity using 3nm silicon.

Marvell PCIe Gen 7 SerDes operates at up to 128 gigatransfers per second (GT/s) per lane doubling data transfer speeds compared with PCI Gen6 making it suitable for compute fabrics inside accelerated server platforms, general-purpose servers, CXL systems and disaggregated infrastructure.

As compared to PCIe Gen 5, which was based on NRZ modulation, PCIe Gen 6 and 7 require the use of PAM4 modulation. Marvell is extending its PAM4-based optical and copper interconnect portfolio beyond Ethernet and InfiniBand into copper and optical PCIe, CXL and proprietary compute fabric links.

“AI workloads are driving the evolution of server interconnects, and our PCIe Gen 7 technology is engineered to meet the performance and scalability needs of next-generation AI data centers,” said Venu Balasubramonian, vice president of product marketing for the connectivity business unit at Marvell, in a statement.