PICMG consortium ratifies COM Express 3.1 to support high-speed serial interfaces
NewsNovember 09, 2022
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."
