RapidIO Connections - December 2003
RapidIO Deployment Growing The deployment of RapidIO as the System Interconnect solution for embedded applications is continuing to grow. Products are available today that use the parallel RapidIO interface and many products are in design for the serial standard. RapidIO is finding applications in communication systems, military applications, and storage arrays. The parallel interface is often used in applications for connecting multiple processors together and to bridge RapidIO to a legacy interconnect infrastructure. For example, the Tundra Semiconductor Tsi500‘ RapidIO Multiport Switch was successfully used to connect four PowerQUICC III processors from Motorola. This multiprocessing platform provides exceptional computing power, a Linux software development environment, and excellent tightly coupled networking with the Tsi500. The Tsi500 is a four port non-blocking RapidIO switch. To bridge from RapidIO to PCI, the Tundra Tsi400‘ RapidIO to PCI Bus Bridge can be used. Whereas the parallel interface is used typically for chip-to-chip interconnection, the serial RapidIO interface is ideal for connection over longer distances such as in back planes, or in applications where there is a high concentration of connectivity. Many companies are developing bridges, switch fabrics, digital signal processors and communications processors with serial RapidIO. The serial interface is ideal in wireless infrastructure where multiple digital signal processors are used to perform the signal processing in the transceiver and the transcoder. In a 3G receive path, there are multiple antennas with the RF and analog front ends feeding into multiple channels of application specific and commercial digital signal processors. These processors implement both the chip rate and symbol rate processing. In addition, there is also a host processor that needs to communicate with the signal processors. As a cell phone user moves throughout the coverage area, the antenna that is receiving the strongest signal will change. In order for the base station to provide for seamless roaming, all of the signal processors need to be able to communicate with each other to enable continuous processing. The best way to implement this is by using a DSP farm, which consists of an array of tightly coupled processors linked together via serial links into a RapidIO switch fabric. Serial RapidIO is ideal at providing a low pin count, low latency, and bandwidth scalable interface required in 3G wireless infrastructure. With mature specifications for both parallel and serial RapidIO and commercially available bridges and switches it is clear that RapidIO is the dominant interconnect standard for embedded applications.
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