Issue link: https://resources.mouser.com/i/1542831
C h a p t e r 3 SCALING FROM EMBEDDED PCIE 4.0 TO DATA CENTER PCIE 7.0 PCIe continues to advance rapidly as data rates move from PCIe 4.0 into PCIe 5.0, PCIe 6.0, and now PCIe 7.0. As bandwidths double and signal integrity requirements tighten, embedded systems designers must carefully evaluate whether the performance gains justify the added complexity of materials, routing, and retiming required to support these speeds. An example of this is industrial systems, where links carry sensor data and control-loop updates, not AI-scale traffic. These applications benefit more from reliability and predictable latency than from raw bandwidth. As such, designers, in general, have prudently stuck with PCIe 4.0 and below. But, as workloads expand, many embedded systems will want future- proof pathways to higher-speed domains for storage, AI inference, and multi- accelerator topologies. For example, AI edge servers often require PCIe 5.0 or PCIe 6.0 retimed links to support GPUs or NPUs. As these workloads generate bursty, data-heavy traffic from sensors, scaling into these domains requires careful channel budgeting and strict validation to maintain stable links. Ian Saturley Associate Director Marketing - Networking & Connectivity Solutions, Microchip Technology Inc. When you're looking at PCIe scalability, a lot of it's going to be defined by what you need for total data throughput and how much data width you have available. The fact that you have that scalability with PCIe technology gives you a lot of design flexibility in terms of how you architect a system." 21 8 Experts Discuss PCIe for Emerging Embedded Systems