Switchtec™ PFX Fanout PCIe Switch Family

Microsemi's Switchtec PFX PCIe fanout switches are the highest density, lowest power, and the most resilient high reliability PCIe switches in the industry. These devices support up to 48 ports, 48 NTBs, and 24 virtual switch partitions. The switches are designed in a 28 nm low-power process which allows for up to 60% lower power than competitive solutions. These are very flexible and configurable devices that support x2, x4, x8, or x16 port bifurcation allowing for efficient lane usage. The PFX fanout has six variants: a 96-lane, 80-lane, 64-lane, 48-lane, 32-lane, and 24-lane switch.

Typical applications for the PFX include data center equipment, defense and industrial servers, workstations, test equipment, video production and broadcasting equipment, cellular infrastructure, access networks, metro networks, core networking, and other connectivity applications. The PFX has strong competitive differentiation, in the areas of scalability, flexible port bifurcation, error containment, high reliability, advanced diagnostic and debug features, low power, and end-to-end connectivity.

The Switchtec PFX PCIe fanout switches have integrated peripheral I/O, a CPU, and management interfaces for ease of configuring and testing. The PCIe is 3.1 spec compliant and resilient and has been customized to handle error containment to prevent system crashes and blue-screens when a hot/surprise-plug occurs in a running system. The SerDes is best-in-class signal integrity and supports an extensive diagnostics and debug software tool called ChipLink.

Standard PCIe 3.1 compliant functions and capabilities are supported, compatible with Linux and Windows.

If a card is built with a PFX and plugged into a slot, it would be recognized in Linux or Windows out of the box.