RapidIO Connections - April 2003
President's Message
Why RapidIO?
The last several months have been eventful ones for the RapidIO Trade Association. Standard product based silicon has been announced and demonstrated from companies like Intrinsity, Motorola and Tundra. We have welcomed Texas Instruments, one of the world's leading semiconductor companies in to the Steering Committee of the Trade Association. System solutions based on RapidIO have also been launched in to the industry. The In the News section of this newsletter contains many of the recent press announcements on RapidIO products and new memberships.
In my travels and speaking engagements I am often asked the question: Why should I use RapidIO in my next design? This is a good question as any new product or technology should be able to justify its existence. I firmly believe that the use of RapidIO will enable customers to develop solution that will meet their performance requirements, with lower risk, while saving money in R&D and equipment costs. Let's examine why I feel justified in making this statement.
Meeting Increasing Performance Requirements
The switch fabric nature of RapidIO provides for increasing system bandwidth as devices are added, as opposed to the reduction in performance and throughput seen with buses like PCI as additional devices are added. Innovative contributions from a number of member companies with extensive experience in switch fabric development have given RapidIO best in class features for throughput, overheard and latency.
Reducing Risk
RapidIO enjoys significant product support from leading semiconductor manufacturers.
Many important components and systems are available now and many more are in development. The RapidIO standard is stable and is internationally certified, having been developed in an open standards-based forum. Interoperability challenges have been well addressed through extensive review processors, simulation model testing as well as hardware based interoperability testing.
Global standards are crucial to customers developing next-generation systems. The RapidIO protocol has been adopted by ECMA; and ISO standards approval is in process. Mechanical standards work is ongoing within VITA and PICMG. The standards process reduces the opportunities for unnecessary changes to the technology.
The Trade Association also provides a complete ecosystem comprised of key semiconductor manufacturers, software suppliers, test equipment providers, systems integrators, and several global telecom OEMs.
While still early in the technology rollout, the open nature of RapidIO encourages the development of multiple sources for standard components, which reduces business risk in choosing the technology or any single vendor.
Saving money
RapidIO provides a high performance COTS interconnect solution that will reduce the OEMs development costs and time-to-market. OEMs can focus on other more value-added development tasks and feel comfortable that by using RapidIO they will have a ready supply of interoperable devices to build their systems with. The RapidIO technology is targeted at the price/performance requirements of real-time embedded applications and should offer more cost effective and focused solutions for those areas.
The capabilities of RapidIO should, for most applications, eliminate the need for high-priced internally developed proprietary interconnect solutions.
Conclusions
The industry needs technologies like RapidIO to lead us out of the slump that we have struggled through for the last three years. As next generation RapidIO-based devices come to market you should feel comfortable both using the technology and asking for it from all of your semiconductor vendors.
Best regards,
Sam Fuller
President, RapidIO Trade Association
©2003 RapidIO Trade Association
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