RapidIO Connections - September 2003
President's Message
The last quarter has been an eventful one for the RapidIO Trade Association. We celebrated our third anniversary at the all members meeting in Ottawa and were impressed with demonstrations of RapidIO based microprocessors, switches and bridges to PCI-X. Systems based on RapidIO have now moved into production and demonstrate the reality and promise of the technology.
OEM Presentations
The Marketing Working Group has been coordinating presentations at leading embedded systems vendors. These seminars, which typically run for six hours, include technical presentations on RapidIO, comparisons to others technologies such as Ethernet, HyperTransport and PCI Express, as well as vendor presentations of RapidIO products. We typically have 12 to 15 vendors present at these events, covering virtually all aspects of RapidIO semiconductor, software and test equipment product offerings. We have several more of these meetings scheduled for the next quarter as summer ends and development work cranks back up.
Dataplane Extensions
In June we announced our Dataplane Extensions effort. This effort, which is based on work that has been going on in the RapidIO Trade Association as well as work contributed by the Advanced Fabric Interface working group, is designed to extend the RapidIO architecture to directly address dataplane applications for backplane fabrics. Briefly, the extensions will include the definition of streaming data transactions to support the segmentation, reassembly and encapsulation of datatypes such as Ethernet frames or ATM cells. Previously individual vendors might have implemented the encapsulation of various networking protocols differently. This work helps to ensure interoperability between various vendors' devices in dataplane environments. Virtual channel mechanisms are also being considered to provide finer grain support for QoS. These extensions will retain compatibility with existing RapidIO switch and endpoint products based on the layered RapidIO architecture.
This work will complement the recently completed end-to-end flow control specification developed by the technical working group. This work, which was begun last year, added mechanisms for managing traffic end to end within a RapidIO network.
Independent Analyst Validation
A recent market research report, published by Crystal Cube Consulting and Metz International, does a good job of describing the technical fit of RapidIO for the embedded space and the lengthy head start that it has in the market. This report predicts RapidIO semiconductor product shipments in excess of $800 Million dollars over the next four years, growing from essentially zero today. As design cycles in the embedded space are typically three years long, we can expect that this is just the tip of the iceberg for RapidIO revenue opportunities.
While there are many fine vendors developing RapidIO products, there are still opportunities for RapidIO switches, bridges and processing devices to meet the varied needs of systems vendors. It is not too late to join the bandwagon. Please feel free to contact me for more information.
Best regards,
Sam Fuller
President, RapidIO Trade Association
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