PICMG continues to upgrade CompactPCI family of specifications

Joe Pavlat Editorial Director

PICMG has just approved a new revision of the CompactPCI Express specification, Revision 2. The new revision to the CompactPCI Express specification adds 5 GTps and 8 GTps PCI Express operation. This provides up to four times the bandwidth while maintaining full backwards compatibility with previous CompactPCI and CompactPCI Express products. Also, this specification goes to great length to define how a product’s PCI Express signaling is validated to ensure interoperability.

“This revision of CompactPCI Express, like the first release of the specification, focuses on interoperability at both the interface and product level, but with the additional benefit of dramatically increasing performance,” says Mark Wetzel, Technical Chair of the CompactPCI Express Subcommittee and Distinguished Engineer at National Instruments.

“This will allow rapid adoption in instrumentation and control applications where performance and interoperability are critical. The PXI standard, which currently builds on top of CompactPCI and CompactPCI Express, will see immediate benefit from this new revision,”

I‘ll be talking about another important member of the family, CompactPCI Serial, in a few weeks.

Joe