PLX Technology is the leading supplier of PCI Express (PCIe), USB and other standard I/O interconnect silicon for the communications, server, storage, embedded-control, and consumer industries. The company provides a competitive edge to its customers through a combination of high-performance interconnect silicon, design tools and partnerships with other industry leaders. PLX is among the industry's first suppliers to announce support, development efforts and actual silicon for PCIe technology, and nine ExpressLane switches and bridges now are either sampling or in full production -- more than all other vendors' PCIe-interconnect devices combined. These PCIe devices have been designed into hundreds of systems in virtually all technology market segments.
I/O interconnect technology, applications:
THE PLX Solution
The PLX I/O interconnect solutions include 32- and 64-bit PCI I/O Accelerators;
PCI-to-PCI and PCI-X-to-PCI-X bridges, PCIe-based switches/bridges and USB controllers. PLX’s RDKs, SDKs and third-party tool support offering through the PLX Partner Program further assists hardware designers and software developers to streamline their product development. In addition, PLX participates in various industry associations to define and lend its expertise to the development of I/O interconnect technology, and address customers’ system requirements.
Bridges, Switches ExpressLane PCI Express Gen 1
Since 2001, PLX has championed PCIe technology. By investing in this next generation serial interconnect early on, PLX was able embark quickly on an aggressive effort to develop PCIe-compliant devices. As a result of this successful effort, PLX has announced the industry’s most complete and flexible line of interconnect chips based on PCIe technology, each of which is presently either sampling or in full production. (White papers explaining important features of these products are available at www.plxtech.com/techinfo.)
Switches ExpressLane PCI Express Gen 2 
PLX’s newest family of switches is based on PCIe Gen 2 technology, featuring throughput of up to 5GT/s (GigaTransfers per second), backward compatibility with PCIe Gen 1 designs, and unmatched flexibility due to its wide array of lane and port counts.
The new devices provide the industry’s lowest latency and power consumption, along with PLX-only, efficiency-enhancing features: Read Pacing™, Dual Cast™ and Dynamic Buffer Allocation. Additionally, three of the newest ExpressLane switches feature an integrated direct-memory access (DMA) engine, which offloads processors to boost PLX Technology 870 W. Maude Ave. Sunnyvale, CA 94085 www.plxtech.com system performance. The switches provide next-generation interconnect performance to graphics, backplane, server, storage, add-in-card, control-plane, and embedded applications.
PCI Express Gen 3 Simplified
In early 2008, the PCI-SIG announced the establishment of a workgroup chartered with the development of the next generation of PCIe " the PCI Express Base Specification 3.0, or PCIe Gen 3.
The Gen 3 specification is yet another step forward in enhancing the usefulness of the PCIe protocol by doubling the effective bandwidth and adding protocol enhancements to increase end-system performance, more......
Bridges PCI and PCI-X Bring Increased Performance and Flexibility
The PLX Fast LaneTM PCI 6000 series has the industry's broadest set of PCIto-PCI and PCI-X to PCI-X bridges. These bridges allow more devices to be attached to the PCI bus, and provide the ability to include intelligent adapters on a PCI bus. In addition, these bridges allow PCI buses of different speeds to be part of the same subsystem.
PLX Technology 870 W. Maude Ave. Sunnyvale, CA 94085 www.plxtech.com
The PLX PCI 6000 series provides designers with support ranging from 32-bit, 33MHz to 64-bit, 66MHz and 64-bit, 133MHz PCI-X. Read about our featured product, the PCI 6540.
PCI I/O Accelerator Chips, Bridging Devices
PLX offers standard, off-the-shelf integrated circuits that provide a performance and time-to-market advantage to designers and manufacturers. Based on the PCI standard, PLX I/O Accelerator products range from simple target-only chips to powerful bridging devices that efficiently move data with minimal processing intervention.
USB Controllers 
PLX’s USB controllers include a family of devices that provide fast I/O connection between computers and consumer-oriented peripherals.
DAS system-on-a-chip
These solutions represent a continued focus on the growing direct attached storage systems market. PLX's strengths lie in the ability to specifically address the digital data storage problem, by leveraging a deep experience and understanding of USB, FireWire and eSATA connectivity, enabling storage system vendors to offer high value-added products to their customers.
Development Tool Support
In addition to extensive experience in I/O interconnect devices, PLX understands its customers’ development requirements. PLX provides development tools that streamline the product-design process for hardware manufacturers and software developers. Our array of RDKs and SDKs help bring new and updated designs to production quickly. These tools enable manufacturers to dedicate more of their resources to product designs, not PCI implementation.
Rapid Development Kits
Providing full support for each silicon device, PLX offers a wide range of flexible RDKs that enable a prospective system or board designers to evaluate the PLX solution. The same RDK can allow early prototyping and provide a platform upon which to start software porting activities. Each PLX RDK includes a proven, working hardware platform incorporating the PLX interconnect chip on a sample board; complete set of board schematics, symbols and layout files for hardware design; and an extensive software PLX Technology 870 W. Maude Ave. Sunnyvale, CA 94085 www.plxtech.comsupport package that includes a graphical utility for access to chip registers, sample drivers and support for leading operating systems.
Software Development Kit
The software development effort for a communication system often is significantly greater than that of the system’s hardware development. The comprehensiveness of PLX’s development software tools significantly reduces the time and effort software engineers must apply to their projects.
additionally, by offering software compatibility across successive generations of semiconductor devices, system designers and software developers are able to extend the useful life of their software investment. The PLX SDKPRO provides building blocks for both host-side and embedded-side PCI software development. The SDK PRO features built-in support for real-time operating systems (RTOSes) and embedded-side APIs.