Microchip Launches Industry’s First Automotive-Qualified Gen 4 PCIe® Switch to Support Autonomous Driving Ecosystem Development

High-speed, low-latency connectivity solutions for distributed heterogeneous computing systems are essential to enabling next-generation autonomous driving applications. Microchip Technology Inc. (Nasdaq: MCHP) has announced the launch of the first automotive-grade certified fourth-generation PCIe® switches on the market. The newly released Switchtec™ PFX, PSX and PAX switch solutions provide cutting-edge computing interconnect capabilities for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS).

“Microchip’s automotive family of Switchtec Gen4 switches delivers the lowest latency and high-bandwidth performance required to connect CPUs and accelerators within ADAS,” said Krishna Mallampati, vice president of marketing and applications for Microchip’s Data Center Solutions business unit. “We are pleased to see the maturation of several years of collaboration with key technology partners and customers bring these solutions to market.”

Switchtec Gen 4 PCIe switches provide high-speed interconnects to support distributed real-time safety-critical data processing in ADAS architectures. PCIe is becoming the preferred computing interconnect solution in the automotive industry for the same reasons it is widely used in the data center market, providing ultra-low latency and low-power bandwidth scalability for CPUs and specialized accelerator devices.

“This is an important milestone and a result of close collaboration with NVIDIA that Microchip’s solutions meet the stringent requirements of the automotive market,” said Michael Truog, senior director of automotive platform architecture at NVIDIA. “Microchip’s automotive PCIe switches provide the flexibility and programmability to enable high-speed SoC and GPU connectivity on the NVIDIA DRIVE platform.”

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