RapidIO Connections - October 2002
Technical Working Group Spotlight
RapidIO Technology Moving Ahead
Over the past year, a not so subtle change of emphasis has occurred within the Technical Working Group (TWG). Previously, there was a strong emphasis on architecting the RapidIO specification. Many companies moved this year into late-stage design. As a result, emphasis within the TWG has shifted towards finalizing the specification based on feedback from individual members' design teams working on actual implementations.
This finalization is best illustrated by the release this past quarter of Revision 1.2 of the specification. Included is the important addition of the Error Management Extensions section. This section represents a completed bookend to a stable and complete RapidIO specification. Revision 1.2 differs from Revision 1.1 in only a few technical areas. Most notable among them is a change to the training sequence that forms part of a RapidIO port's initialization. This change broadened the design space for RapidIO implementations.
The Error Management section adds to the original robust error coverage of RapidIO by providing a standard programming model for hardware to interact with software. This will enable more consistency across vendors when handling error scenarios and will allow significantly more software interoperability.
And so, as the end of the year looms, the emphasis within the RapidIO community moves from early-stage architecture and design to late-stage and system-level design work.
The nature of the Technical Working Group activity has necessarily changed with this new focus. Much of the recent TWG effort has gone into the creation of several "errata" which clarify areas of the specification that implementers have found to be potentially ambiguous. Rather than correcting significant errors, these documents describe clarifications that insure an even greater degree of interoperability across all RapidIO devices.
Meanwhile, the Technical Task Group activities described in my last update are now reaching completion and will soon be brought before the TWG. These activities will allow RapidIO to leverage existing mechanical platforms and move onto the dataplane among other things.
Greg Shippen
Chair, Technical Working Group
RapidIO Trade Association
