Industry Insights - Page 2

Deployment of RapidIO in the Merchant Embedded Computing Market

By Steve Berry, Principal Analyst, Electronic Trend Publications

Unlike most competing standards, the RapidIO standard was designed with its primary mission being the support of board- and box-level embedded applications. Such applications are the primary market for RapidIO technology’s original creators—Motorola Semiconductor (now Freescale) and Mercury Computer Systems.

Compared to the PC market, the embedded market moves at a glacial pace. PCI Express—which was developed several years after the RapidIO standard—will be deployed in all PCs by the end of 2007. RapidIO, by contrast, exists in only a handful of applications to date. But based on discussions with numerous vendors at the Bus & Board Conference in January 2006, there is considerable enthusiasm for the long-term future of RapidIO technology and products.

Product announcements with RapidIO technology as a central feature are gaining momentum within the group of merchant board vendors that will likely provide many of the RapidIO-based products. A quick review of some of the latest board-level product announcements from this group of vendors finds the following:

Mercury Computer Systems, Inc.—a provider of high-performance embedded, real-time digital signal and image processing solutions—recently announced an expanded PowerStream integrated multi-computer family with the PowerStream 6100, the industry's first 6U VME system based on the Serial RapidIO interconnect fabric and compliant with the VXS (VITA 41.2) form factor standard. At 761 GFLOPS and 42 Gbps sustained fabric throughput, the PowerStream 6100 sets a new record for performance available in the VME form factor.

Mercury and Texas Instruments recently announced collaboration on the development of the Mercury MTI-203 AMC (Advanced Mezzanine Card) for WiMAX wireless infrastructure digital base band applications. The Mercury MTI-203 will be anchored with three TCI6482 DSPs and a supporting compute node to create a WiMAX infrastructure base band solution. The MTI-203 DSP/FPGA AMC expands the capabilities of the Mercury Ensemble2 family of blades and AMC modules. The Ensemble2 AdvancedTCA platform is specifically designed around the performance, scalability, and reliability of the Serial RapidIO embedded system interconnect for data plane applications.

BittWare, Inc.—a provider of hybrid (DSP and FPGA) board-level solutions based on Analog Devices’ SHARC and Altera’s FPGA technology—recently announced that it has teamed up with Mercury Computer Systems to utilize Mercury's Serial RapidIO endpoint on Bittware’s B2-AMC (B2AM) board. The B2AM combines Analog Devices TigerSHARC with Altera's Stratix II. This quad ADSP-TS201 AMC board supports universal base band processing for any wireless application including WiMAX, Software Defined Radio, and Super 3G.

Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing (CWCEC)—a supplier of embedded boards and integrated electronics subsystems for diverse markets and applications, including defense and aerospace, medical imaging, and industrial process control—recently announced the CHAMP-AV6, a VITA 46 (VPX)-based DSP engine. The CHAMP-AV6 combines quad PowerPC 8641 devices with four Serial RapidIO ports to provide 10 Gbps full duplex bandwidth.

Micro Memory, LLC, is a provider of high performance board-level products for streaming signal and image processing, real time data acquisition, and enterprise network storage. For signal processing systems and real time data acquisition, Micro Memory’s Othello line of VMEbus carriers have optional connectivity to switch fabrics such as Serial RapidIO.

Thales Computers supplies military and aerospace companies and government programs with COTS-based VMEbus and CompactPCI system solutions. Thales recently introduced a Serial RapidIO system into the embedded computing marketplace, the PowerMP4-60. This system consists of combined PowerPC and Pentium technology. Its RapidIO high-performance, packet-switched interconnect technology addresses the embedded industry's need for reliability, increased bandwidth, and faster bus speeds in an intrasystem interconnect. Thales also recently introduced the PMC-RIO, which complements Thales' standard PMCs by offering a Serial RapidIO crossbar solution. This PMC provides an efficient and off-the-shelf way to interconnect computing nodes inside a signal processing calculator.

In the coming years, we can expect a steady stream of announcements involving RapidIO products from the merchant embedded computing community. These announcements will be followed by steadily increasing shipments of RapidIO-based products. For the latest information on the RapidIO standard, members, and products, visit http://www.RapidIO.org.