2006: RapidIO® Systems Deployed In Your Market!

By Tom Cox, Executive Director, RapidIO Trade Association

RapidIO technology has taken the embedded market by storm, and to some observers RapidIO has come out of nowhere to become the switch fabric interconnect of choice in many applications. The fact that RapidIO has become the choice of not only chip-to-chip interconnects, but backplane data fabrics may seem like this has been a quick domination of the market. In taking a closer look this has been a five-year venture of carefully laid specifications and strong industry supported infrastructure development. The foundation of RapidIO has been carefully constructed and the fruits of that work are being deployed in systems in 2006.

RapidIO is an established, scalable, open-standard, switched fabric, designed by the leaders in embedded computing specifically for OEMs building equipment in the wireless infrastructure, edge networking, storage, scientific, military and industrial markets. RapidIO delivers the reliability, cost effectiveness, performance and scalability required in these markets. RapidIO technology supports a roadmap which is attuned to the changes affecting designers of embedded infrastructure.

As executive director of the RapidIO Trade Association, I’m often asked why RapidIO has done so well in wireless infrastructure and edge networking. These vertical applications are the mainstay of the early designs done with RapidIO components. The answer to this question is that these market applications have the greatest market growth and the systems need performance/cost upgrades. Multiple embedded communications processors, switches and DSPs dominate these applications; market demand made these the first generation components available in the ecosystem.

Throughout 2006 we will continue to see an explosion of the market base of RapidIO systems being deployed based on ATCA, VITA and other blade form factors. Military systems with RapidIO fabric backplanes have already placed RapidIO technology as the incumbent in systems from Mercury Computer Systems, Curtis Wright and Spectrum Signal Processing. Telecom is embracing the ATCA platform for its performance and cost benefits, and RapidIO technology is winning with a match of market requirements and broad product availability. Behind the scenes, enterprise, server and storage OEM’s are looking at reliability, determinism and cache coherency system requirements, and are seeing the same match of requirements to match customer demand and required performance to out run the competition.