As the industry transitions to PCIe Gen5, architects in AI, HPC, and high-performance storage are encountering a common physical bottleneck: onboard NVMe connectivity.  With most enterprise platforms offering only one or two native Gen5 M.2 slots, scaling high-speed infrastructure has historically meant compromising on signal integrity or latency. Our Rocket 1604L, an Active Retimer-based Gen5 x16 M.2 Expansion Add-In-Card, was designed specifically to address this problem.