ChipX (Santa Clara, Calif.) said its kit differs from other PCIe development kits, which use PHYs supplied by third parties that are not available in intellectual property (IP) form for later integration.

"Once developers build their PCIe prototype in an FPGA, they must spend precious development time re-qualifying their design to migrate to lower cost structured ASIC or standard cell implementations," said Wouter Suverkropp, ChipX director of strategic marketing, in a statement. "By allowing developers to design and verify their initial PCIe prototype with the same PHY they will use in their final structured ASIC or Standard Cell implementation, our new development kit helps users lower their design risk and accelerate time-to-volume production."

ChipX said the CX6100 development kit provides an ideal prototyping environment by supplying a development board with a CX6159 structured ASIC containing the ChipX PCIe PHY and PIPE Gasket Logic and an Altera Stratix FPGA. The PCIe PHY supports high bandwidth applications through both x1 and x4 lane operation, the company said.

To initialize and control PHY parameters, the kit includes an I2C port and a Windows-based GUI supplied on a CD-ROM, the company said. Designers can program a synthesizable PCIe controller, available from ChipX or a third party vendor and customized logic, into the FPGA using standard Altera tools, ChipX said.

The CX6100 PCI Express development kit with PCI Express PHY is sampling immediately, ChipX said. It will be in full production by the third quarter. It costs $3,995 in single quantities, including hardware and software, the company said.