Broadcom Introduces New PCIe 6.0 Solutions – Switch Chip and Retimers

Last March, Astera Labs announced the Aries 6 chips for PCIe 6.0. Now Broadcom has announced the availability of its own PCIe 6.0 solutions: the PEX 90144 switch chip, as well as the BCM85668 and BCM85667 retimers, have debuted.

PCIe 6.0-enabled products are said to be “critical, high-performance building blocks” needed to deploy advanced AI infrastructure, with companies including Micron and Teledyne LeCroy taking part in the testing.

Image source: Broadcom

The BCM85668 and BCM85667 retimers support 8 and 16 PCIe 6 lanes, respectively. They are manufactured using 5 nm technology. They are backward compatible with PCIe generations 5/4/3/2/1, as well as compatible with Compute Express Link (CXL 3.1). They can operate in 64, 32, 16, 8, 5, and 2.5 GT/s (billion transfers per second) modes. The BCM85668 supports x8, 2×4, and 4×2 bifurcation. The BCM85667 supports 1×16, 4×4, and 8×2 configurations. They claim to support low-power modes and proprietary low-latency (LL) modes.

The PEX 90144 switch chip, in turn, has 144 lines. The product is designed to coordinate traffic flows. Full technical specifications are not disclosed at the moment. A year ago, PEX 90104 chips were also mentioned and the development of PCI Express 7.0 switches with support for AMD AFL (Accelerated Fabric Link), a switched version of Infinity Fabric, was discussed.