RapidIO Products, Systems and RapidFabric™ Detailed At Media Briefing

Six Chip, Systems and Software Member-Companies Discuss 2004 Efforts;
“Bus Wars” Report Update Shows RapidIO Continues as Interconnect Revenue Leader;
New RapidFabric™ Specifications Reviewed by RapidIO Trade Association

San Francisco, Calif. (March 31, 2004) – During a media briefing held today at the Electronica USA/Embedded Systems Conference, product initiatives using the RapidIO® system interconnect technology were presented by six member companies of the RapidIO Trade Association: Analog Devices (NYSE: ADI), Enea Embedded Technology, Mercury Computer Systems (NASDAQ: MRCY), Texas Instruments (NYSE: TXN), Tundra Semiconductor (TSX: TUN), and Xilinx (NASDAQ: XLNX). The RapidIO Trade Association also reviewed its new RapidFabric™ specifications targeted at advanced communications applications.

“RapidIO’s strong ecosystem of embedded silicon, software, systems, and OEM companies continues to propel this advanced interconnect technology,” said John G. Metz of market analyst firm Metz International. “Research conducted for our newly updated Bus Wars report shows that RapidIO will continue to maintain its early lead, and attain projected revenues of approximately $2 billion in 2008.” More information is available on the Bus Wars reports at www.metzinternational.com.

The RapidFabric™ specifications will extend the RapidIO interconnect applicability in system design to address the requirements of communications fabrics. It provides communications equipment vendors with protocol-independent encapsulation of any packet/cell/frame protocol data unit (PDU), segmentation and reassembly of large (64kB) PDUs, hundreds of traffic classes, and millions of flows and PHYs. RapidFabric seamlessly interoperates with the existing RapidIO specification.

Eric Mantion, senior analyst at research firm In-Stat/MDR, notes: "RapidIO has always been firmly focused on meeting the needs of the $120 billion embedded communications market. With support for hundreds of traffic classes and millions of flows/PHY devices, the RapidFabric initiative should help cultivate massive synergy between RapidIO-based products and the AdvancedTCA and CompactTCA form factors. Together, these revolutionary technologies could help to dramatically change the face of the high-end networking gear market and help backers of these technologies capture billions of dollars of this market relatively quickly." - more –

A brief summary follows of each company’s main messages:

Analog Devices: Analog Devices is developing serial RapidIO for its next-generation TigerSHARC® processors. The combination of RapidIO's speed between chips, boards, and backplanes, along with TigerSHARC's raw performance, will enable a new class of high-performance, low-cost, high-capacity 3G wireless base stations. http://www.analog.com/processors/processors/tigersharc/index.html

Enea: Enea Embedded Technology, supplier of the OSE RTOS, is developing full support for the RapidIO parallel and serial interconnect standards. RapidIO matches perfectly with OSE’s distributed direct message passing model, seamless transparent distribution, dynamic system configuration, fault tolerance, and fault management. Enea will soon be demonstrating its multi-processing support under OSE featuring RapidIO (parallel) on Motorola’s Torridon demonstration board featuring four Motorola PowerQUICC™ III MPC8560 processors with a Tundra Tsi500 RapidIO multi-port switch. www.ose.com

Mercury Computer Systems: Shipping for the past year, Mercury’s ImpactRT™ 3100 system is being used in semiconductor imaging equipment and laser pattern generation equipment for flat panel displays because the RapidIO technology improves computing performance and lowers technology investment. Mercury’s latest RapidIO system, the PowerStream® 7000, delivers extreme processing density with a TeraFLOPS or more of total processing power. www.mc.com/technology_corner/rapidio.cfm

Texas Instruments: TI believes that serial RapidIO capability on its next-generation of wireless infrastructure DSPs and ASICs will enable efficient communication and seamless connection between devices in communications systems. www.ti.com

Tundra Semiconductor: "Tundra continues to achieve significant customer and partner milestones through the execution of our RapidIO strategy,” said Rick O'Connor, chief technology officer at Tundra Semiconductor. "Our Tsi500‘ RapidIO Multi-port Bus Switch and our Tsi400‘ RapidIO-to-PCI Bus Bridge were the first RapidIO system interconnect products on the market. We continue to support the RapidIO Trade Association and to invest in next-generation serial RapidIO technology and product development." www.tundra.com

Xilinx: Xilinx is expanding its existing RapidIO product offering with the introduction of a comprehensive ATCA Development Platform. This platform, combined with the Xilinx RapidIO LogiCore solution, enables the rapid deployment of AdvancedTCA‘ systems targeting the PICMG® 3.5 standard for high-speed networking and communications design. The ATCA development platform features a line card design based on Xilinx Virtex-II Pro‘ FPGAs, test and demonstration programs, as well as schematic and board layout files. Example FPGA designs and selected reference designs are also available as part of the platform. For ATCA information: http://www.xilinx.xom/esp/networks_telecom/optical/xlnx_net/atca_dev.htm
For Xilinx RapidIO LogiCORE‘ information: http://www.xilinx.com/rapidio/indx.htm

More information on the RapidIO interconnect is available at the RapidIO website (www.rapidio.org) including information on system-enablement tools, RapidIO vendor product lists, synthesizable Verilog cores, analog physical layer cores, logic and protocol analyzers, operating system support, bus functional models, and hardware interoperability platforms.

About the RapidIO Trade Association:
The RapidIO Trade Association and its global members drive the RapidIO® interconnect architecture. This ISO-certified, open-standard seamlessly enables the chip-to-chip, board-to-board, control, backplane and data plane interconnections needed in high-performance networking, communications and embedded systems. RapidIO-based products are shipping now, including silicon chips, boards and systems. Detailed information on the RapidIO specification, products, design tools, member companies, and membership is available at www.RapidIO.org.

RapidIO is a registered trademark and RapidFabric™ is a trademark of the RapidIO Trade Association. Product and company names mentioned may be trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective holders.