Increasing bandwidth to 128 GB/s with a tailored PCIe 6.0 IP Controller By Romain Tourneau, PLDA While the PCIe 6.0 specification is expected to be finalized and released later in 2021, PLDA has been hard at work to address the needs of early adopters looking for the most advanced PCIe 6.0 IP solution for their SoCs and ASICs. Although PCIe 5.0-enabled systems are not yet available in the general market, Automotive, AI and IoT system designers are already pushing for more bandwidth than 5.0 supports. Self-driving cars are the perfect example of this need -- to continuously sense and react to the surrounding environment in real time, the autonomous driving systems need to access historical data stores containing weather, obstacles, and traffic and road conditions. These enormous data dumps, accounting for every minute, hour, day and year that a driverless car is out on the road, have to be managed and stored. Of course, a large part of a driverless car's environment will be accounting for other vehicles. Thus, driverless cars must be equipped with a myriad of sensors creating and transferring machine-to-machine data with speeds of up to 1GB per second. Big data storage will then be an absolute necessity, along with smart management of the data feed, its sensors, and vehicle libraries. Within this example, PCIe 6.0 is the best protocol candidate to interconnect the different elements.