RapidIO Connections Newsletter - Summer 2005Insights:What are some of the benefits to having an open standard? From Loring Wirbel, Communications Group Editorial Director, CMP:The era of proprietary backplanes and switching fabrics is past, not only because customers don't like being locked in to a single vendor, but also because customers find greater value and more rapid adoption of technology when they can choose modular hardware, protocol stacks, firmware. etc. Some worry about the easier route to commoditization that could be enabled, particularly for Asian ODMs/OEMs, but this is inevitable in any scenario. For some developers in communications, standardization boils down to the word "Ethernet", particularly now that the Layer 2 framing standard is being considered for LAN, WAN, and even serial interconnect. In reality, merely touting Ethernet for interconnects and fabrics does not provide the degree of physical and data-link layer standardization that many customers demand. From Chris Ciufo, Group Editorial Director, Military Embedded Systems:Open standards often create markets, whereas proprietary implementations (sometimes called ‘standards’ by the companies who develop them) stifle the creativity of the larger market. When a company creates some IP and opens it up to the world and the company's competition, more ‘brain power’ can be applied to making that standard more useful, and can apply it to many more markets. Often, the standard finds its way into applications and markets that the originator never intended or dreamed of. A company that maintains a proprietary implementation (a closed ‘standard’) can garner 100% of their TAM, depending on how they define their total available market. But once the standard becomes open, and more vendors jump on board, a company (including the originator) will definitely garner less than 100% of the TAM, but the TAM is usually many, many times bigger. The situation goes from 100 percent of a small pie, to a smaller slice of a hugely larger pie. This is not just because new opportunities are found, but also because customers are more encouraged to use a standard once there is competition, numerous vendors to choose from, and a growing ‘ecosystem’ of support products and services. Few customers want to rely on proprietary and closed sole-source IP "standards". For example, AMD's proprietary TAXI chipset was intended for high speed serial communication to replace bus architectures. The revolutionary at the time (late 1980's) TAXI (Transparent Asynchronous Transceiver Interface) used 4B/5B encoding with 8-bit interfaces at either end, but a 2-wire link (simplex) in between. Despite all the excitement about 100 Mbits/s serial communication (at 125 Mbaud), the chipset never achieved wide market success. It wasn't until AMD offered the technology to the Fibre Channel ANSI committee - and opened up the ‘secret sauce’ a bit more - that the technology found a real home. The fundamental parallel to serial conversion process became the basis for Fibre Channel FC-3, FDDI (100 Mbits/s), and (in DC-balanced 8B/10B versions) inspired LVDS signaling implementations that are the basis for most current-generation serial fabric standards such as RapidIO®. Did AMD invent modern serial communications technology? No. But the TAXI once its proprietary moniker was removed - showed the market and myriad other companies that the concept of serial communications was valid and could be realized. AMD eventually actively promoted the TAXI in the original ANSI committees for FDDI, Fibre Channel, HiPPI, ESCON and others. The TAXI (now using 8B/10B and running at 166 Mbits/s) was often used to prototype myriad serial implementation schemes. In short: AMD's small market TAM for ‘bus extenders’ has burgeoned into the hugely growing market for serial communications schemes - most of which are based upon the proprietary principles and implementation of the TAXI chip set. Open standards create markets - they're the right approach in technology. From Simon Stanley, Founder and Principal Consultant, Earlswood Marketing Limited:By using an open standard, system developers can achieve significantly faster time-to-market. Once an open standard is agreed then significant semiconductor investment is made into delivering optimized solutions. With an open standard there is a wider vendor base with competing, but interoperable, solutions driving integration and lower system costs. |