Professional Documents
Culture Documents
PCIe 6 SPECIFICATION
PCIe 6 SPECIFICATION
PCIe 6 SPECIFICATION
0 SPECIFICATION
THE PCIe® 6.0 SPECIFICATION
In early 2022, PCI-SIG® released the full version of the PCI Express® (PCIe®) 6.0 specification. As with previous versions,
the latest version doubles the data rate of the PCIe 5.0 specification and maintains backwards compatibility.
In general, NRZ modulation supports an eye diagram that has one “eye.” For the PCIe 5.0 specification, the “eye” has a
specific eye height and voltage level depending on the defined channel length. PAM4 modulation eye diagrams support
three “eyes.” For the PCIe 6.0 specification, each “eye” also has a defined eye height and voltage level for a specific
signal channel.
Previous PCIe specifications have been NRZ or PAM2. The PAM4 specification has been adopted by other networking
standards, starting with 56 Gbps, 112 Gbps, and in the future, 224 Gbps. Precedent exists in other standards for PAM4.
PAM4 signaling enables a doubling of the data rate while using the same Nyquist frequency of a corresponding NRZ
modulation schematic.
For example, PCIe 5.0 architecture uses a Nyquist frequency of 16 GHz. Using PAM4 modulation, PCIe 6.0 architecture uses
the same Nyquist frequency of 16 GHz, yet the data rate doubles to 64 GT/s per link and up to 256 Gbps bidirectional
bandwidth via a x16 configuration.
Another way to look at this is, for the same signal frequency, you can double the data rate, or increase the bandwidth or
throughput for next-generation applications.
PCIe 6.0 SPECIFICATION - APPLICATIONS
PAM4 enables the PCIe 6.0 specification to provide the bandwidth required for high-data-rate applications such as
► Data Centers
► Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning
► HPC – High Performance Computing
► Automotive
► IoT
► Military/Aerospace
All of these applications require a high data rate, so doubling it from the PCIe 5.0 specification to the PCIe 6.0
specification allows the specification to meet the demands required by these markets.