PCI Express Cable

Hi,

Does anybody here have experience designing something to do PCIe over cable? I need to design (ie, draw the schematic of) a target device that will have a Molex cable/connector coming in, some Pericom or such equalizer chips, and an Altera Arria II GX45 FPGA. There are enough ways to mess this up that I'd sure like to have a consultant check what I'm doing for me.

We plan to use a OneStop host-end board to drive the cable, in the customer's control computer.

This will be 8-lane Gen1, so the electricals (PCB layout and such) shouldn't be too bad... if I connect the right things to the right things.

jjlarkin atsign highlandtechnology dotthing com

Reply to
John Larkin
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A PCIe extender? We bought and built some at my old place.

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Reply to
a7yvm109gf5d1

What we're going to do is have the customer plug one of these

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into his system, then run it through one of these

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then into a mating connector on our board. Then a couple of equalizer chips, then into the FPGA.

I'm trying to piece together the puzzle. I've made an honest try at reading the Mindshare (mind-numbing) PCIe book, all 1047 pages of it, but it's very light on the hardware aspects, and don't even mention PCIe over cable. The index doesn't include the words "cable" or even "connector." PCIe is shockingly complex; I'm amazed it works at all.

John

Reply to
John Larkin

looked at something like this for inspiration?

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-Lasse

Reply to
langwadt

You should get the PCIe-over-cable spec. The communication staff is actually rather simple. PCIe is surprisingly robust. But there are rather confusing hot plug signaling requirements.

Regards,

Kolja cronologic

Reply to
Kolja Sulimma

We have been running PCIe Gen1 with our Raggedstone2 Spartan-6 development boards over short ribbon cables and it is remarkably robust like other people have seen. We have not tried that yet with our Raggedstone3 Cyclone IV GX development boards yet but that is on the list to do.

Proper PCIe cables e.g.

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yvzJX9hakCFUEb4QodPGjjkg should be pretty good.

John Adair Enterpoint Ltd.

Reply to
John Adair

Probably so. It's $1000. Or I can join the consortium, and get all the specs, for $3000. I think I can get my customer to pay for it!

This money-for-specs thing is sort of annoying.

John

Reply to
John Larkin

Nahh, just search on internet. Its out there for free!

--
Failure does not prove something is impossible, failure simply
indicates you are not using the right tools...
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Reply to
Nico Coesel

John,

We've been using One Stop Systems (

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) - Gen1 and Gen2 PCIe cables, host adapters, and express cards.

Thanks, Evgeni

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Reply to
OutputLogic

My customer plans to use their XMC board to drive their end of the cable.

John

Reply to
John Larkin

I own a Magma PCI bus extender, which sounds similar to your project. DigiDesign on the peninsula used to use them extensively in digital sound recording before multichannel cards existed. It is a grossly overpriced product, but it you need one, you pay the piper.

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Maybe they can OEM something for you. Just don't expect it to be cheap.

Incidentally, windows and linux recognize the bus extender without a hitch. No driver issues at all.

Reply to
miso

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