Military Embedded Systems

PICMG consortium ratifies COM Express 3.1 to support high-speed serial interfaces

News

November 09, 2022

Lisa Daigle

Assistant Managing Editor

Military Embedded Systems

Image courtesy PICMG

WAKEFIELD, Mass. The PICMG consortium has ratified the new COM Express 3.1 specification to support high-speed serial interfaces such as PCIe Gen 4 and USB4.

PICMG -- a not-for-profit 501(c) organization of companies and other firms that collaboratively develop open standards for high-performance industrial, industrial IoT, military and aerospace, telecommunications, test and measurement, medical, and general-purpose embedded computing applications -- says that these new interfaces will enable COM Express to continue to fulfill its role as the leading computer-on-module (COM) standard for performance-rich client systems.

To support this high-speed signaling, an updated 16 Gb/sec connector has been specified across the family’s Type 6, 7, and 10 pinouts and added SATA Gen 3 signal-integrity and loss budget information. These improvements join pinout-specific upgrades including optional USB4 (Type 6), MIPI-CSI connectors (Types 6, 10), SoundWire (Types 6, 10), as well as an additional general-purpose SPI interface (Types 6, 10). A CEI signaling-enabled 10 GbE interface and IPMB management interface are also now defined in the Type 7 pinout as part of COM.0 R3.1.

Jeff Munch, CTO of Adlink Technology and chairman of the COM Express subcommittee, said of the newly ratified 3.1 standard: "In the latest release of the COM Express specification, the subcommittee has added support for PCI Express Gen 4, USB4, and newer 10G side-band interfaces while maximizing backwards compatibility."

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