Designing PCIe interfaces and extenders

Matt Millman blogs about two designs which provide additional PCIe slots in modern computers.

The first, above, is a small form factor OCuLink/U.2 To PCIe X4 adapter.

Some time ago I designed an “as small as possible” adapter to make use of spare OCuLink/U.2 ports that are often seen on PC motherboards these days. There are of course ready made products which more-or-less do the same thing, but they were all oversized, awkward and difficult to incorporate into an small form factor (SFF) build.

OCuLink is an extension for the “cable version of PCI Express”, acting as a competitor to versions 3 and 4 of the Thunderbolt interface. See this on GitHub and the blog post.

Second is a PCIe Bifurcation Riser,

I designed a couple of PCIe Bifurcation risers to solve some difficult build problems I was faced with, namely fitting a second PCIe card into a case which was only designed for one.

See this project on GitHub and the blog post.


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