What Is PCIe? PCI Express in Industrial Embedded Computing

What Is PCIe?

PCIe (PCI Express) is the standard expansion bus used in modern computers to connect high-speed peripheral devices — GPUs, NVMe SSDs, network cards, and industrial I/O expansion cards — directly to the processor. It replaced the older PCI and AGP buses and is now universal across industrial motherboards, workstations, and embedded computers.

PCIe Lanes and Generations

PCIe bandwidth scales with the number of lanes (×1, ×4, ×8, ×16) and the generation:

Generation	Speed per Lane	×16 Bandwidth
PCIe 3.0	1 GB/s	16 GB/s
PCIe 4.0	2 GB/s	32 GB/s
PCIe 5.0	4 GB/s	64 GB/s

PCIe in Industrial Embedded Computing

Industrial applications for PCIe expansion include:

• Machine vision — PCIe frame grabber cards for camera interfaces (Camera Link, CoaXPress)
• AI inference — PCIe GPU cards (NVIDIA RTX, Intel ARC) for edge AI workloads
• High-speed storage — NVMe SSDs over PCIe ×4 for data-intensive applications
• Industrial I/O — PCIe cards adding serial ports, digital I/O, or motion control interfaces
• Networking — multi-port GbE or 10GbE cards for network-intensive SCADA or vision systems

Avalue's ATX and EATX industrial motherboards support PCIe 4.0 and 5.0 expansion — contact TSL Automation to identify the right board for your expansion requirements.