CONNECTOR-SYSTEM DENSITY AND SIGNAL INTEGRITY HOLD KEYS TO PCIe 5 SUCCESS

Steady growth in datacenter infrastructure investment—including accelerator hardware, high-performance computing platforms, servers, and storage—is driving similar growth in PCI Express (PCIe). The market research firm IndustryARC predicts the PCIe market will grow at a CAGR of 20.6% from 2021 to 2026, when it will exceed $48 billion. 360 Research Reports focuses on the PCIe solid-state drive market and estimates that the global PCIe SSD market will reach $8.929 billion by 2026, from $2.257 billion in 2020, at a CAGR of 25.8% from 2021 to 2026.

Interest in PCIe technology will be boosted in 2021 and 2022 by the arrival of PCIe 5, which operates at 32 Gbps, up from 16 Gbps for PCIe 4. Gen 5 is beginning to appear in part because large semiconductor manufacturers are beginning to design PCIe 5 capabilities into their latest server chips, and electronic design automation firms and semiconductor foundries are supporting PCIe 5. For example, in May, Cadence Design Systems Inc. announced availability of Cadence IP supporting PCIe 5 on TSMC’s N5 process technology. The PCIe SIG said the next follow-on version on the TSMC N3 process technology is expected to be taped out in early 2022.