PLX announced two new PCIe Gen 2 switches designed with 24 ports, the most in the industry, to meet the connectivity demands of complex communications systems.  The new PLX® ExpressLane™ PEX 8625 (24 lanes, 24 ports) and PEX 8636 (36 lanes, 24 ports) switches are supported by visionPAK™, the market’s only software suite of system debug tools, evaluation and signal-integrity utilities.

A key feature of the PEX 8625 and PEX 8636 is the ability to multicast, which increases the efficiency in communications platforms as it allows each host to communicate to all endpoints at the same time.  Another leading attribute of the new switches is the multi-host feature.  Multi-host switches provide multiple upstream ports to connect to several CPUs, thereby reducing the number of system components and minimizing latency.

The new PEX 8625 and PEX 8636 communications switches are designed primarily for the control plane to provide connectivity to a large number of endpoints such as ASICs and FPGAs.  A control plane, by the nature of data traffic, thrives in low latency and these PLX switches enable system designers to build control planes with the industry’s lowest latency.

PEX 8625 and PEX 8636 also offer Non-Transparency (NT) for system redundancy.  PLX continues to be the only vendor providing the NT feature in all 22 of its Gen 2 switches.  Additionally, an exclusive set of diagnostic and monitoring features, called visionPAK, are also integrated into all PLX Gen 2 switches and are focused on getting designs to market faster. Offered standard via the PLX software design kit (SDK), visionPAK includes the ability to access internal data paths and state machines for debugging systems; a tool to measure Rx eye width inside the device for validating signal integrity; a function to inject errors to check system behavior; loopback Tx to debug data paths, and the capability for packet performance/activity monitoring.