The Programmable SERDES provides a Physical Media Attachment (PMA) Layer and synthesizable Physical Coding Sublayer (PCS). The integrated PHY for PCIe 3.0 operates at 2.5Gbps, 5Gbps and 8Gbps, and for SATA3 at 1.5Gbps, 3.0Gbps and 6Gbps. The PHY additionally features an interface capability that allows integration with other customer-designed serial protocol PCS layers at any baud rate up to 8Gbps.
The PMA is delivered as a hard macro while the fully-synthesizable soft PCS includes performing all necessary calibration and self-test functions. The universal PHY architecture allows forming arbitrarily wide efficient links by being independent of the need for a common CMU.