Exicon Develops CXL 2.0 Tester... "Completion in Q1 Next Year"

Exicon announced on the 21st that it will complete the development of the CXL 2.0 tester by the first quarter of next year.

Exicon was the first in Korea to commercialize an SSD Gen5 tester based on PCIe. This product established itself as the company's flagship product, achieving record-high sales last year. Exicon had already completed the development of the CXL 1.1 tester last year. However, as CXL products remained in the early concept stage and the market did not mature, it was discontinued.

Subsequently, with Intel announcing future versions of CXL (2.0 and 3.0), the company is developing a CXL 2.0 tester in response and plans to complete development by the first quarter of next year.

CXL 2.0 adds new features such as memory switching, memory pooling, and data encryption support to the existing 1.1 version (a specification announced before market release). It is regarded as laying the foundation for implementing a fully distributed system that can dynamically connect accelerators, DRAM, and others to servers.

Exicon is preparing the CXL 2.0 and SSD Gen6 testers as its flagship products after next year. Having already secured PCIe interface technology, the company is conducting various verifications to supply testers ahead of its customers' mass production schedules.

An Exicon representative said, "As the number one company in the domestic SSD tester market share, we will secure the CXL 2.0 and SSD Gen6 markets and maintain our position as the strongest player."

CXL is a newly proposed interface designed to more efficiently utilize accelerators, memory, storage devices, and others used alongside CPUs in high-performance computing systems. It can overcome the physical limitations of memory capacity in existing computing systems.

Previously, only semiconductors matching specific standards such as DDR4 or DDR5 could be used according to the memory interface supported by the CPU, but by applying CXL technology, any memory can be installed regardless of type, capacity, or performance. CXL is becoming a comprehensive interface connecting numerous CPUs, memory, accelerators like GPUs, and other peripherals, and it is likely to become the standard for servers within the next few years.