PCIe Test Card that supports up to Gen4.

[jd.phillips]

Is there a PCIe Test Card in the works that supports up to Gen4 or at least Gen3?

Thanks!

[David (PassMark)]

We has been looking at the possibilities for more than a year now. At one point we even had a prototype PCIe 3 solution with a FPGA, but there there low level problems with FPGA that the FPGA vendor didn't want to fix. We could have still put it to market, but the top speeds was limited due to the unfixable hardware bugs. So we held off.

Just this week we bought a different HDK (hardware development kit) for hardware that should in theory go as high as PCIe4. If it does work mass production will be some months away, but we are working on it.

[jd.phillips]

Any chance I could get a status update on how things are going on this issue?

[David (PassMark)]

We got side tracked. But we are working on it. There are technical problems with the new FPGA HDK as well. Documentation is incorrect and code samples don't work (errors during synthesis, when high level FPGA code is converted into gates). We'll probably have a better idea of what's possible in a few weeks. Definitely no public product for at least 4 months however. There are also very serious problems with chip shortages as well. So production would be a big problem even if we could start production today, which we can't. We expect these to get better over the next 6 months however.