CXL® Consortium member company Microchip Technology Inc. participated in a recent Q&A session to discuss its contributions in the Consortium, use cases that will be ideal targets for CXL technology and CXL’s impact on the future memory and storage industry. Continue reading for the full Q&A session with Microchip Technology Inc. below.
Can you share a brief introduction of Microchip?
Microchip Technology Inc. is a leading provider of smart, connected, and secure embedded control solutions. Its easy-to-use development tools and comprehensive product portfolio enable customers to create optimal designs which reduce risk while lowering total system cost and time to market. The company’s solutions serve more than 120,000 customers across the industrial, automotive, consumer, aerospace and defense, communications and computing markets.
Why did Microchip decide to join the CXL® Consortium?
Microchip recognized the benefits of the transition to memory expansion and memory-centric compute solutions that are enabled by CXL. Our technologies match and we wanted to contribute towards the definition and enablement of CXL to ensure industry-wide success and adoption.
What expertise does Microchip bring to the consortium?
Microchip has extensive experience and expertise in developing NVM Express® (NVMe®) and PCI Express® (PCIe®) switching and endpoint solutions that improve server storage performance, reliability and security to service high performance computing and Artificial Intelligence (AI)/Machine Learning (ML) applications which are primary areas where CXL adds value. Microchip is an active contributor to many industry defining interface standards bodies and organizations including PCI-SIG®, NVM Express, and SAS to ensure interoperability within the technology standards.
What is the biggest advantage of CXL Consortium membership? How does Microchip participate?
The CXL Consortium membership enables Microchip to actively influence and participate in defining the CXL specification. Our perspectives from the silicon development and system solutions spaces are some of the many perspectives that ensures CXL is robust and applicable to a broad range of applications.
We are engaged in most of the working groups and our contributions have helped to define the switching architectures, out of band management, and forensic capture concepts that continue to evolve to meet the objectives and broad range of use cases that CXL encompasses.
What use cases will be ideal targets for CXL technology? Which market segments will benefit from CXL?
CXL radically expands the memory access for CPU cores, GPUs, and accelerators and creates the ability for cache-coherent memory sharing and pooling for memory centric architectures. All computing architectures will benefit, with the biggest enablement being in the realm of high-performance computing, AI and ML applications.
What does Microchip see as CXL’s impact within your industry?
CXL has garnered tremendous attention from several of Microchip’s ecosystem partners including CPU/GPU vendors, memory vendors, Hyperscale and datacenter customers. CXL extends the scope of our PCIe and memory controller portfolio. Ecosystem partners across the computing industry have been actively working on developing products that will be enabled by CXL’s capabilities.
Keep up with CXL Blogs for future member spotlight posts from other CXL Consortium members. Are you a member interested in participating in the Member Spotlight series? Send a message to press@computeexpresslink.org for more details.