Dear friends,
I have been assigned a project wherein I need to design a PCIe to Peripheral controller in OrCAD.As further information,I have been given a block diagram of the PCIe and nothing more. Can someone tell me how to get a headstart to this problem? Do I have to use OrCAD capture for this?Are there any reference material that you can suggest which would help me understanding design on OrCAD.

Hi,

1. If you need to learn ORCAD technology, then you should start at the ORCAD product pages at Cadence, use all the documentation and training to your advantage:

http://www.cadence.com/products/orcad/pages/default.aspx

2. If you need to learn PCI-express technology, then you might want to start at wikkipedia pcie webpage:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI_Express

Good Luck, -richv.

Hi

Check my pcie_mini IP core here on opencores.
If you have no idea how to design a PCIe card, then you may not have experience with complex board level logic design. In that case its better tell your boss to cancel the project, or change it for example to a PCI-card project which is much simpler to implement on a PCB. If you have experience with complex board design then just start reading for example the xilinx spartan-6 datasheets, especially the electrical/clocking/gtp/pcie documents. Also read the related standards, maybe a few books as well. After this you should have some idea what to do next. At least good hardware designers would know without asking so general questions. This is not something that any engineer could do. Also, if you never used Orcad or other PCB software, you better not start with a PCIe card, but with something much simpler, then after few years of excercise you could finally try the PCIe card.
I see forum posts here and other places often where unexperienced people want to design something that is very challenging even for the most experienced engineers. Just have some sense to reality folks!

regards,
Istvan

PCIe is a very fast bus. You will need to zig-zag the signal traces to make sure all signals arrive at the same time. PCIe, SATA, and GigEthernet should be reserved for experienced professionals with the tools needed for the job.

Byron