NEC offers ExpEther 40G for PCI Express to North America

NEC Corporation of America has added ExpEther 40G technology to its ExpEther 1G/10G offerings in North America. The technology enables the transmission of PCI Express traffic over Ethernet infrastructure.

NEC says the fact that ExpEther connections maintain the native PCI Express connectivity, linked PCI Express devices located in multiple places can be operated as a single system. Operators therefore can perform standard PCI Express configurations, interruptions, and hot plugging remotely with an Ethernet LAN, as if they were connected to a virtual single-hop PCI Express switch, NEC says.

The ExpEther 40G technology also can benefit data center workload acceleration efforts, NEC adds. The technology enables the connection of GPGPU, NVMe SSD, or FPGA-based accelerators via an Ethernet connection. NEC says it has worked with fellow ExpEther Consortium member Xilinx to validate and enable the ExpEther 40G technology as either an IP core or an ExpEther platform leveraging Xilinx UltraScale FPGAs.

NEC also has joined the OpenPOWER Foundation to apply ExpEther's technology to IBM's POWER Architecture.

"IBM believes that the ExpEther technology can bring innovative and differentiating capabilities to IBM Power Systems and a growing set of POWER-based systems developed and delivered by the rapidly expanding OpenPOWER community," said Rakesh Sharma, OpenPOWER Chief Engineer, IBM. "NEC's ExpEther technology matches the concept of the POWER Architecture's and IBM Power Systems' disaggregated I/O."

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