PEX9700 Series Switch Chips

Product Brief

General Features

• State-of-the-art switch fabric

− Sharing I/Os among multiple

hosts

− Low latency TWC

• Any port can be a host port or

Downstream (device) Port

• Works with standard PCIe end-

points and hosts – and software,

as well as with existing application

software

• MSI-X support

• Allows flexible fabric topologies

Key Advantages

• PCI Express Switches

− 12 to 97 Lanes with Integrated

on-chip SerDes

−5 to 25 Independent ports

−Designate any Port as the

Upstream Port

− Low-power SerDes (under 90

mW per Lane)

− Device-Specific Relaxed Ordering

− Port configuration

− Dedicated management port

for mCPU

Converge Servers and IO controllers with PCIe

• Create cost-effective high-availability hyperscale systems by enabling

communication between in-rack hosts and endpoints using PCIe

• Simplify connectivity while providing the highest PCIe switching

performance available for data center servers, storage, and networks

• Reduce latency, system complexity, and power consumption

by up to 50% in data-intensive environments

• Take advantage of industry-first features for most demanding hyper-

converged, NVMe and rack scale systems

Broadcom PEX9700 switches allow customers to build high performance, low

latency, scalable, cost-effective PCI Express-based fabrics. The switches enable

I/O sharing with standard SR-IOV or multifunction capability, allowing multiple

hosts or Nodes to reside on a single PCIe-based network. Hosts communicate

through Tunneled Window Connection (TWC), a special low latency host-to-

host communication capability for short packets.

Shared I/O Using Standards

PEX9700 switches allow the Virtual Functions (VFs) of SRIOV endpoints

(such as an Broadcom MegaRAID® SAS controller) to be shared and

assigned to multiple hosts concurrently. Each host can enumerate its

assigned functions using standard BIOS and OS software and use them with

unmodified vendor-supplied drivers. The use of standard system software

minimizes software support costs.

Software-Defined Fabric

The switches are built on a hybrid hardware/software platform that offers high

configurability and flexibility in regards to the number of hosts, end-points,

and PCIe slots. The critical pathways have direct hardware support, enabling

the fabric to offer non-blocking, line speed performance with features such

as I/O sharing. The solution is completed by management processor that

communicates with platform management via API and/or CLI. The solution

offers an innovative approach to setup and control, making use of an off-

chip management CPU (mCPU) to initialize the PEX9700 switch, configure

the routing tables, handle errors, Hot-Plug events, and enable the solution to

extend the capabilities without modifying the system software.

Tunneled Window Connection (TWC)

TWC allows short messages to be sent from one host to another in a very low

latency manner, and without the overhead associated with DMA.

Managed PCI Express Switches Based on

ExpressFabric® Technology

PEX9700 Series Switch Chips