Faced with high-definition video, rapidly growing digital content and the world’s demand for high-quality mobile entertainment technology, we can determine that consumers’ demand for uploading and downloading content on various consumer and computing platforms is higher than The speed of transmission provided by existing solutions. Will PCI Express be the solution? After two years, will high-speed USB transfer be considered "slow"?
USB applications face new challenges
At present, USB has been successfully popularized in the market, and almost every PC peripheral device adopts USB as the main transmission interface. Its application is very extensive, including electric coasters, aquariums and even ashtrays, of course, there are other more common USB peripheral devices such as printers, scanners, mice and memory devices such as Walkman. In addition, most applications can support the bandwidth limitation of high-speed USB (commonly referred to as the USB 2.0 interface).
The question of USB usability stems from the demand for new broadband for video and audio applications. Video capture is one of the fastest growing areas in the PC industry. In the past few years, Microsoft has continued to expand support for media applications in the Windows operating system, and even tailored an operating system called "Windows Media Center Edition" specifically for video capture and playback needs.
Video capture consumes a lot of bandwidth. For example, the standard-quality movie format has a transmission speed of 27 Mb/sec, which will also account for more than half of the bandwidth of the USB 2.0 high-speed interface. Although USB 2.0 is said to have a transmission speed of up to 480 Mbits per second or 60 Mbytes per second, it is actually only 40 to 48 Mbits per second because of the speed limit of the host-side chipset in the PC. In fact, under such applications, USB can provide enough bandwidth to support watching TV programs on PCs. The problem is that consumers do not need a single TV stream. They want to have a stream that can simultaneously plug and play videos. , which is the advanced digital video recorder (DVR).
Digital recorders are popular with the TiVo brand. TiVo is the first digital device that allows users to easily manipulate images using the "Time Migration" function. A typical DVR allows the user to continue to record other segments while playing while watching the pre-recorded program from the beginning, or to play the previous screen while recording the “playing†program. This "time shift" function is similar to the "pause" and "immediate playback" functions. For example, the user can watch the program starting at 8 o'clock in the evening at 8:15 pm. When the user watches the original clip from 8:00 to 8:01, the DVR will continue to store the clip from 8:15 to 8:16 in the streaming mode on the hard disk at the same time.
To match this type of application, the DVR must support three 27 Mbps data transmission streams: one for "storage data streams", the other for "delayed data streams" that support Tuner #2, and one for "storage" output to digital TVs. Streaming. As content becomes more diverse, and higher-quality video also requires streaming, resulting in insufficient USB bandwidth to support this type of usage, and therefore PCI Express will become an important technology in the future.
What's interesting is that most people's focus on PCI Express only focuses on the part that it will replace PCI technology. In fact, the continuous demand for bandwidth from enterprise users, consumers, and network users is the key reason for PCI to transfer to the PCI Express interface. Most of today's most important data communications equipment platforms use the PCI interface. In the future, they must be converted to PCI Express interfaces.
These two different problems can be solved with the same technology. Digital TV streaming faces the problem of data transmission outside the device, while data communication problems belong to the transmission bottleneck inside the device. However, both problems can be solved through PCI Express.
PCIe technology advantages
The difficulty of technology transfer is one of the important factors that determine the success or failure of its transition. If the difficulty of transfer is too high, the adoption of new technologies will result in excessive costs and lengthy processes, and the feasibility is relatively low. When billions of USB devices and PCI interfaces need to be transferred to new interfaces, the ease of migration becomes a critical factor, which is why PCI Express is successful. Therefore, consideration should also be given to the similarity of the architecture design to ensure a simpler transfer process.
An important reason for the success of PCIe is the compatibility with PCI addressing mode, so that all current applications and drivers maintain the same mode of operation. This alone will make PCIe technology a big step forward. In addition, PCIe provides 250Mbps bidirectional transmission speed, and PCI is limited to unidirectional transmission of 133Mbps, so a single-channel PCIe device can provide twice or four times higher transmission speed than PCI devices. The 16x PCIe graphics card has already been asked by the market. Uploading and downloading both offer amazing 4Gbps transfer speeds.
Similarly, compatibility with the USB architecture also makes PCIe an ideal technology to replace high-bandwidth USB.
As PCI moves to PCI Express, its commonality also plays an important role in the transfer of USB to PCI Express. PCIe and USB have many similar features, such as serial signals, point-to-point bus communications, and standardized transmission line specifications (PCIe is completing the standard setting). In addition, both PCI Express topology and expansion capabilities are similar to USB. Both interfaces use a point-to-point connection mode and therefore require the use of an expansion device. The expansion of the USB uses a hub that relays the signals and converts the transmission speed, switching from the 480Mb high-speed host to the 12Mb required to maintain backward compatibility. PCI Express expansion devices are called switches.
For today's products, in addition to hardware compatibility, software compatibility is also very important. During the transition from USB 1.1 to USB 2.0, the industry has invested considerable effort to ensure that the device is compatible with existing drivers. PCI Express continues the same strategy. Drivers for any PCI adapter card need to support the PCIe solution without any changes. If you already have a sort of driver (Windows built-in driver), then it's easier to develop the driver. There are many good driver development kits for PCI Express and USB, so the R&D work for new design products is quite similar. In fact, Microsoft's newly-developed WDF (Windows Driver Foundation) has incorporated support for USB and PCIe. The goal of WDF is to make driver development easier and reduce the chance of driver crashes.
It is not difficult to directly replace PCI with PCIe, because the PCIe and PCI adapters have almost the same size specifications. The software interface is also designed to be the same as PCI, and the flexibility and space are reserved for expansion. Users can easily install PCI or PCIe adapters. .
However, some people are not optimistic about the trend of PCI Express to replace USB. Compared with PCI, the main advantage of USB is that it allows the peripheral device to connect to the host system in an external mode, making it easy to connect a variety of devices, including a compact U disk to a larger laser printer. USB also provides a simpler installation process. General home PC users do not know whether there is a PCI or PCIe slot in the computer, and certainly not know that there are still a few slots left to use.
The difference between PCIe and PCI is that it not only provides the connection interface inside the machine, but also provides an external connection interface, which can be used as the connection point of peripheral devices. In 1991, they asked the city's ExpressCard new expansion card standard to replace the PC Card slot of each laptop.
ExpressCard is also a competitor of USB and new specification USB devices, providing an easy installation process similar to the USB interface. In fact, it contains USB and PCIe interfaces, so that adapter vendors can choose PCIe or USB construction technology. Many vendors are actively redesigning existing USB products and incorporating them into the ExpressCard specifications. Applications suitable for use with the ExpressCard solution include wireless communication interfaces such as Bluetooth and 802.11.
Promotion vendors are working hard to make desktop computers use the ExpressCard interface. The ExpressCard slot configured on the front panel of the desktop computer provides a high-speed transmission interface, which is much easier than inserting a PCIe adapter card after opening the case. However, there are still no PC makers that add ExpressCard slots to their desktop products and only add ExpressCard interfaces to their laptops.
With so many similarities between USB and PCI Express interfaces, plus the increasing demand for higher-bandwidth peripherals and PCI Express infrastructure specifications, the industry needs to be ready to transfer its high-bandwidth peripherals to the PCI Express data bus. .
Does this mean that USB will be eliminated? the answer is negative. USB will continue to play a lower-cost solution because it has fewer pins. With the increasing popularity of USB IP today, wafer manufacturers including TSMC and UMC have introduced IP function libraries, making the design work using this interface simpler and easier.
Because of these features, USB will continue to be the ideal solution for mouse, keyboard, and other low-cost PC peripherals in the coming years. In bandwidth-hungry applications, USB is expected to be quickly eliminated by high-speed Internet access technology just like a 9.6Kbits-per-second modem—since PCI Express has pushed data transfer to a whole new level!
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