PCIe® Retimer | Montage Technology

Overview PCIe Retimer Technology Key Advantages Typical Application Scenarios Product List Resources Related News Contact Us

PCIe® Retimer

As AI clusters and cloud data centers continue to scale, maintaining high-speed signal integrity and reliability over long-distance transmission has become a critical challenge. Issues such as channel loss, signal jitter, and limited transmission distance are increasingly constraining system compute performance. To address these challenges, Montage Technology introduces its PCIe® Retimer series, purpose-built for high-speed interconnect scenarios in AI servers and cloud data centers. By enhancing signal integrity and extending effective transmission distance, the series delivers a stable and scalable interconnect foundation for GPU clusters, storage arrays, hardware accelerators, and other core components.

Montage Technology offers a comprehensive lineup of PCIe Retimer products supporting the maximum data rates of PCIe 5.0 and 6.x, compatible with mainstream industry standards and package specifications. This series of PCIe Retimer products all adopt self-developed SerDes IP, offering significant advantages in transmission efficiency, channel adaptability, and compatibility.

Furthermore, through deep collaboration with leading players in CPUs, GPUs, SSDs, NICs, and switch chips, Montage Technology's PCIe Retimer products have undergone extensive interoperability testing, ensuring stability and compatibility in real-world cloud deployments and providing a robust, reliable interconnect foundation for cloud computing and AI applications.

Application of PCIe Retimer in AI Server

PCIe Retimer Technology

With the rapid development of data centers, servers, high-performance storage, and AI acceleration systems, PCIe links face increasing demands in terms of speed, bandwidth, and system complexity. High-speed signals are prone to attenuation, jitter, and bit errors during long-distance transmission and complex board-level interconnects, directly affecting system performance, reliability, and design complexity. To address these challenges, PCIe Retimer technology has emerged. By retiming high-speed signals, performing equalization compensation, and adapting protocols, PCIe Retimers not only improve signal integrity and ensure the stability of high-speed transmission, but also extend link distances, enhance system design flexibility, and support multi-generation PCIe protocol compatibility, thereby providing reliable and efficient high-speed interconnect solutions for complex systems.

Improve Signal Integrity and Ensure High-Speed Transmission Stability

When PCIe signals pass through connectors, PCB traces, cables, and other transmission media, issues such as attenuation, noise, and jitter accumulation may occur. PCIe Retimers effectively recover signals by receiving and retiming input signals, while combining transmitter pre-emphasis and receiver equalization techniques to compensate for signal attenuation and distortion, thereby significantly improving link signal integrity.

Extend Transmission Distance and Enhance System Design Flexibility

As system scale and integration continue to increase, PCIe links need to support longer PCB traces, backplanes, and external cable interconnects. PCIe Retimers extend the transmission distance of PCIe signals by relaying and reconstructing signals along the link. Moreover, the introduction of PCIe Retimers breaks through traditional PCIe limitations on routing length and topology, providing more flexible hardware layout and expansion capabilities to meet the design requirements of complex system architectures.

Support Multi-Generation Protocol Compatibility and Enhance System Scalability

PCIe Retimers support automatic negotiation and compatible operation of multiple PCIe protocol generations, enabling seamless interconnection between Gen3, Gen4, Gen5, and up to Gen6 devices. This not only ensures stable communication during system upgrades or in mixed environments, but also facilitates hardware expansion and subsequent upgrades, while reducing design costs and debugging complexity, thereby improving overall system flexibility and scalability.

Key Advantages

High Performance

Ensures signal integrity, enables low-latency transmission, and breaks through system interconnect bottlenecks.

High Ease of Use

Provides a comprehensive product portfolio, simplifies motherboard design, and is supported by a rich suite of software and tools.

Superior link management

Features a built-in embedded analyzer with enhanced telemetry capabilities, enabling visualized link status monitoring and diagnostics.

Broad Interoperability

Extensive interoperability testing completed with leading CPU, PCIe switch chip, SSD, GPU, and NIC vendors, ensuring compatibility across multiple generations of PCIe

Performance Specifications

Transfer Rate

Up to 64 GT/s
Latency

Lower than 3 ns
Power Consumption

Competitive with industry standards
Package Size

Mainstream industry-standard packaging for easy system deployment and integration

Typical Application Scenarios

Storage server
Enterprise storage systems are rapidly evolving toward NVMe all-flash arrays and large-scale SSD clusters, where signal attenuation across backplanes, cables, and connectors increasingly limits scalability and throughput. Montage Technology's PCIe Retimer series compensates for channel loss and eliminates jitter, extending high-speed signal reach to ensure stable connectivity for large-scale NVMe SSDs. The solution delivers a high-bandwidth, low-latency interconnect foundation, unlocking the full performance potential of storage systems.

AI Server
AI training and inference servers rely on GPU clusters and accelerators for large-scale parallel computing. As model parameters scale from billions to trillions, surging bandwidth demands make signal bottlenecks a key challenge to compute scalability. Montage Technology's PCIe Retimer series, designed for high-density AI interconnects, enhances signal integrity and extends transmission distance to ensure stable connectivity among multiple GPUs and accelerators, enabling efficient collaboration and scaling of large-scale compute clusters.

General-purpose Server
In general-purpose servers, growing CPU cores and I/O bandwidth make signal attenuation over long-distance links a growing threat to system stability. Montage Technology's PCIe Retimer series enhances signal integrity and extends transmission distance, ensuring stable communication between CPUs and NVMe SSDs, NICs, and other devices, while simplifying motherboard design for a reliable, scalable interconnect foundation.

Product List

Part No.*	Description - All - Gen6 Gen5	Specification	Lane	Data Rate - All - 64 32	Application	Package	Document
M88RT61632	Gen6 Retimer	PCIe 6.x/CXL 3.x	×16	64 GT/s	Accelerators, Servers and Storage Appliances	354-ball FCCSP	Product Brief
M88RT51632(TR)	Gen5 Retimer	PCIe 5.0/CXL 2.0	×16	32 GT/s	Accelerators, Servers and Storage Appliances	354-ball FCCSP	Product Brief