Inside Electronics

The PCI-SIG PCI Express Gen 7 standard is now available but work has not stopped there. PCIe Gen 8 is on the horizon and with a planned doubling of the bandwidth to 256 GT/s. This will be challenging from a number of perspectives from support copper connections at this speed to advancements in the protocol.  

In this episode, Electronic Design talks to Karl Wachswender, Senior Principal System Architect at Lattice Semiconductor. Lattice is well known for its power efficient FPGAs that support artificial intelligence (AI) applications. They also address post-quantum cryptography, and are found in demanding applications like automotive. 

Nanusens creates nanoscale sensor structures inside the CMOS layers using standard CMOS processes within the same production flow as making the control electronics on the same chip. This approach reduces the size and cost as it benefits from the vast economies of scale of using giant CMOS fabs. The resulting single chip solution has a packaged size of 0.5 mm³. This episode delves into the technology, its future, and some limitations.

Christian Bornschein, Manager of Marketing & Sales at Port Industrial Automation, talks about how Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) is employed in industrial automation. We also discuss some real-world examples and how TSN enables simpler, more effective industrial control product development. 

RAID, redundant array of independent disks, uses redundancy to provide a more robust disk drive array capable of operation even with the loss of a drive. RAID 1 replicates data with a 50% overhead. RAID 5 and 6 are more common in larger arrays with less overhead as more drives are added to the mix but with a tradeoff in performance.   Mark Anthony, Product Line Manager at Microchip Technology, talks about the company's SmartRAID 4300 Series, which is designed to accelerate the operation of RAID arrays implemented build on NVMe drives.