Astera Labs Aries Smart Retimer Wins 2021 LEAP Award

October 25, 2021 at 08:00 AM EDT

Industry’s Leading Interconnect Portfolio Selected as Gold Winner in Award’s Connectivity Category

Astera Labs, a pioneer in purpose-built connectivity solutions for intelligent systems, today announced that its Aries Compute Express Link™ (CXL™) 2.0 Smart Retimer portfolio has won the 2021 Leadership in Engineering and Achievement Program (LEAP) Award. Aries Smart Retimer was selected as the Gold winner in the Award’s Connectivity category for being the most innovative interconnect product addressing bandwidth, performance and latency issues in data centers.

The connectivity backbone in next-generation cloud and data center servers is being redefined due to the broad implementation of heterogeneous compute architectures. These architectures, where GPUs/AI processors and other accelerators work alongside with general-purpose CPUs and workload-optimized platforms, require a connectivity backbone with faster and lower-latency interconnects.

The Aries Smart Retimer portfolio is designed to empower system designers to easily double the signal reach while delivering six times lower latency compared to PCIe and CXL specifications. In addition, the portfolio of Retimers is capable of achieving plug-and-play interoperation without compromising interconnect topologies even at 32 GT/s speeds that correspond to PCI Express® (PCIe®) 5.0 and CXL™ 2.0 technologies. Astera Labs is the industry’s pioneer in delivering rigorously tested Smart Retimer SoCs for PCIe 4.0, PCIe 5.0 and CXL applications with up to 32 bi-directional lanes.

“We are proud and equally thankful for the recognition this award bestows upon us,” said Casey Morrison, vice president of products for Astera Labs. “Astera employees’ unwavering commitment to our vision of making artificial intelligence in the cloud a reality, along with support from our partners, customers and investors has enabled us to deliver industry-leading solutions.”

Astera Aries Smart Retimer portfolio is deployed after extensive testing for interoperability with all major root complexes and PCIe endpoints in Astera Labs’ Cloud-Scale Interop Lab. The Smart Link Health Monitoring capabilities built into Astera’s Retimers simplify fleet management and improve overall resource optimization through deep system visibility. Aries Smart Retimers are scalable across PCIe 4.0, PCIe 5.0 and CXL architectures allowing protection of investment for data center system designers. The Aries portfolio has been broadly adopted by the top five CPU/GPU/AI processor platforms in the world and majority of cloud service providers.

The 2021 LEAP Awards celebrate the most innovative and forward-thinking products serving the design engineering space. Award winners are chosen by an independent judging panel of twelve engineering and academic professionals following their evaluation of entries received from across the globe. On announcing Astera Labs as the Gold Winner in the Connectivity category, the judges commented: “A powerful and innovative addition to the system designers’ toolbox.”

Resources

Learn more about how the Aries Smart Retimer Low-Latency Mode delivers sub-10ns latency.

Video: Enabling PCIe® 5.0 System Level Testing and Low Latency Mode for CXL™

Visit www.asteralabs.com or contact info@asteralabs.com for more information on its CXL connectivity solutions.

About Astera Labs

Astera Labs Inc., a fabless semiconductor company headquartered in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley, is a leader in purpose-built connectivity solutions for data-centric systems throughout the data center. The company’s product portfolio includes system-aware semiconductor integrated circuits, boards, and services to enable robust CXL, PCIe, and Ethernet connectivity. For more information about Astera Labs including open positions, visit www.AsteraLabs.com.

Compute Express Link™ and CXL™ are trademarks of the CXL™ Consortium.

PCI Express® and PCIe® are trademarks or registered trademarks of PCI-SIG.