1 Netherlands Antillean Guilder = 0.4643 Cayman Islands Dollar

1 Netherlands Antillean Guilder = 0.1723 Kuwaiti Dinar

1 Netherlands Antillean Guilder = 679.4786 South Korean Won

1 Netherlands Antillean Guilder = 59.0742 Kenyan Shilling

1 Netherlands Antillean Guilder = 59.4229 Japanese Yen

1 Netherlands Antillean Guilder = 0.3952 Jordanian Dinar

1 Netherlands Antillean Guilder = 81.4617 Icelandic Krona

1 Netherlands Antillean Guilder = 42.0588 Indian Rupee

1 Netherlands Antillean Guilder = 1.9534 Israeli New Sheqel

1 Netherlands Antillean Guilder = 8229.3895 Indonesian Rupiah

1 Netherlands Antillean Guilder = 180.0022 Hungarian Forint

1 Netherlands Antillean Guilder = 3.8651 Croatian Kuna

1 Netherlands Antillean Guilder = 13.943 Honduran Lempira

1 Netherlands Antillean Guilder = 4.3265 Hong Kong Dollar

1 Netherlands Antillean Guilder = 0.449 British Pound Sterling

1 Netherlands Antillean Guilder = 1.255 Fiji Dollar

1 Netherlands Antillean Guilder = 0.5078 Euro

1 Netherlands Antillean Guilder = 8.6696 Egyptian Pound

1 Netherlands Antillean Guilder = 7.9448 Estonian Kroon

1 Netherlands Antillean Guilder = 71.4884 Algerian Dinar

1 Netherlands Antillean Guilder = 30.6598 Dominican Peso

1 Netherlands Antillean Guilder = 3.8329 Danish Krone

1 Netherlands Antillean Guilder = 13.9999 Czech Republic Koruna

1 Netherlands Antillean Guilder = 316.9212 Costa Rican Colon

1 Netherlands Antillean Guilder = 2170.5102 Colombian Peso

1 Netherlands Antillean Guilder = 3.9406 Chinese Yuan Renminbi

1 Netherlands Antillean Guilder = 460.0067 Chilean Peso

1 Netherlands Antillean Guilder = 0.5409 Swiss Franc

1 Netherlands Antillean Guilder = 0.7808 Canadian Dollar

1 Netherlands Antillean Guilder = 6.7649 Botswana Pula

1 Netherlands Antillean Guilder = 3.1932 Brazilian Real

1 Netherlands Antillean Guilder = 3.8412 Bolivian Boliviano

1 Netherlands Antillean Guilder = 0.7872 Brunei Dollar

1 Netherlands Antillean Guilder = 0.2107 Bahraini Dinar

1 Netherlands Antillean Guilder = 1.0057 Bulgarian Lev

1 Netherlands Antillean Guilder = 47.3454 Bangladeshi Taka

1 Netherlands Antillean Guilder = 0.8525 Australian Dollar

1 Netherlands Antillean Guilder = 37.0281 Argentine Peso

1 Netherlands Antillean Guilder = 2.0461 United Arab Emirates Dirham

1 Estonian Kroon = 0.1259 Netherlands Antillean Guilder

1 Danish Krone = 0.2609 Netherlands Antillean Guilder

1 Fiji Dollar = 0.7968 Netherlands Antillean Guilder

1 New Zealand Dollar = 1.1019 Netherlands Antillean Guilder

1 Croatian Kuna = 0.2587 Netherlands Antillean Guilder

1 Peruvian Nuevo Sol = 0.5281 Netherlands Antillean Guilder

1 Dominican Peso = 0.0326 Netherlands Antillean Guilder

1 Papua New Guinean Kina = 0.5233 Netherlands Antillean Guilder

1 Brunei Dollar = 1.2703 Netherlands Antillean Guilder

PCIe has been widely adopted in the electronics industry since its first debut in 2003 (PCIe 1.0 standard release) for wide breach of applications, from Data Center Server, Networking, to Mobile, AI/ML, Automotive, IoT, and many others…. It’s a versatile, high-performance, robust, mature interconnect standard with full “backward compatibility” (e.g., a PCIe 3.0 device can still function well in a PCIe 4.0 system) which enables a solid and strong PCIe eco-system in the industry.  While the market, so as the users,  are enjoying the systems, e.g., desktop/laptop, powered (or to be more specific: “bridged”) by PCIe 3.0 since 2010, the industry is pushing hard for the PCIe 4.0 eco-system enablement. Earlier this year, AMD announced it X570 chipset would support the PCIe 4.0 interface and Phison also introduced the world’s first PCIe 4.0 SSD.

On the standard evolution front, the official PCIe 5.0 came out in May 2019, doubling the data rate to 32GT/s from 16GT/s in PCIe 4.0. The PCIe 6.0 standard will be released in 2021 based on the announcement made by PCI-SIG in June’19 with the goal to further double the data rate to 64GT/s with incorporating the PAM4 coding.

PCIe Protocol Evolution

Having said that, is the latest generation of PCIe always desired?  

My answer would be positive. Just like car maker/enthusiast has kept pursuing faster car in the history, there is no doubt that these speed enhancements/upgrades in the electronic world certainly provide a tremendous benefit for especially those applications craving the most throughput, such as Data center, HPC, Networking, Cloud and AI applications.   

But, does every application have to opt for the fastest speed (bandwidth)? My view would be leaning toward “Not really”. Just like we don’t need a 3-second sport car (meaning 0-60mph acceleration < 3s) for daily commute though it would certainly spice some driving fun on the road, but it may not be "the best fit" for most of commuters.

There are applications still well satisfied with PCIe 3.0 (or even older PCIe 2.0) for its best performance and cost balance.  Those applications include, but not limit to, IoT/consumer, Edge AI, SSD (non-enterprise),…etc. They typically need to make trade-off in between the cost, power consumption (especially battery powered), flexibility on changing product features, and time-to-market (TTM). To address such type of market needs, Cadence also offers an PPA (Performance, Power, Area) optimized PCIe 3.0 solution in addition to its high-performance PCIe 4.0 product line.

Cadence PCIe 3.0 PHY Solution (with Multi-Protocol Multi-Link feature)

With leveraging the multi-protocol SerDes implementation, the same Cadence PHY IP support multi-protocol and multi-link operation. Such a multi-protocol enabled PHY gives the SoC developers the optimum flexibility to integrate multiple commonly used interface protocols (e.g., PCIe 3.0 + USB 3.0) with using only a single PHY design.  This would largely save the product development time (faster TTM), reduce the risk of using multiple different PHY instances (for different protocol needs), and with the configurability to enable different product features/protocols.

Some people might say PCIe 3.0 era has gone. I was not quite yet being convinced as I still see its potential to shine a lot of market use cases. What do you think?

More Information

For more information on Cadence's PCIe IP offerings, see our PCI Express page.

For more information on PCIe in general, and on the various PCI standards, see the PCI-SIG website.

Related Posts

• Blog: PCIe Gen4: It’s Official, We’re Compliant
• Blog: The PCIe 4.0 Era Continues at PCI-SIG Developers Conference 2016
• Blog: Cadence PCIe Solutions: Configurable, Compliant, and Low Power

I've heard lots of people asking for a way to generate Makefiles for Specman code, and it seems there are some who don't use "irun" which takes care of this automatically. So I wrote this little utility to build a basic Makefile based on the compiled and loaded e code.

It's really easy to use: at any time load the snmakedeps.e into Specman, and use "write makefile <name> [-ignore_test]".
This will dump a Makefile with a set of variables corresponding to the loaded packages, and targets to build any compiled modules.
Using -ignore_test will avoid having the test file in the Makefile, in case you switch tests often (who doesn't?).

It also writes a stub target so you can do "make stub_ncvlog" or "make stub vhdl" etc.

The targets are pretty basic, I thought it was more useful to #include this into the main Makefile and define your own more complex targets / dependencies as required.

The package uses the "reflection" facility of the e language, which is now documented since Specman 8.1, so you can extend this utility if you want (please share any enhancements you make).

 Enjoy! :-)

Steve.