RapidIO® Connections - Q1 2007
Association News
The Importance of Standards,
More Important Than the Technology Itself?
By Tom Cox, Executive Director, RapidIO Trade Association
As I return from this year's Bus and Board show in Long Beach, Calif., I find myself reflecting on the keynote delivered by Daniel Hoste, CEO of Tundra. I'm reminded and inspired to recall an early paper written by Sam Fuller and myself, titled: "Anatomy of a Forward-looking Open Standard," published in 2002 in IEEE Computer Magazine. This paper was an early reflection of our thoughts on the RapidIO standard, the importance of open standards development, and the market benefits of RapidIO technology.
That paper stated, "The RapidIO interconnect specification represents the state of the art in standards development. This open specification resolves an essential design bottleneck while also creating a clear migration path for systems based on existing or legacy architectures. The process of bringing this specification to market demonstrates that contributing to a collaborative standards development effort can be beneficial to all the participants. Designing to the specification can reduce manufacturing costs and time to market while significantly increasing bandwidth."
In his keynote Mr. Hoste also hammered home a number of good points related to standards development and equally important, to the adoption of these standards:
Widely adopted standards are a must to generate the volumes that are needed to deliver silicon with quality, reliability and cost targets...
Acceleration of standardization is more important than acceleration of technology...
In his closing, Mr. Hoste delivered a clear call to action:
We need to drive and contribute to standards definition and adoption…RapidIO has the right features, cost, and ecosystem for the critical embedded systems…It's time to make the right choice with RapidIO...
These points speak loudly to the founding principals of the RapidIO Association, and point to the wide adoption that RapidIO clearly is generating in the market today, both in terms of design interest and products from leading vendors.
More thought provoking is the statement that standardization is more important than the acceleration of technology. As engineers, marketers and technology junkies, the mere thought of demoting the importance of technology over anything! is akin to treason and attacks our very souls. When it comes to technology we work, live and drive technology as fast as it can go; it's a duty and creed.
Still we are faced with the cost/benefit dilemma: while technology does not stand still, costs are driving a new reality. The NRE and production costs in time and money for chips, boards and systems continue to bring a focus to standardization over customization. This was true in the standardization and commoditization of the PC and in COTs and VME systems for military and now telecom equipment. It was PCIs standardization and wide adoption that delivered success as PCI was just one of a dozen "hot" technologies at the time. Compact PCI and VME, while not technology revolutions, focused on driving the economics and meeting the goals of critical embedded applications.
With the importance of standardization playing such a key role in our market, Daniel Hoste's call to action validates and amplifies the work of the RapidIO Trade Association. While the technical working groups continue to drive the definition of the standard, we all have a role to play in adoption by creating awareness of the far-reaching benefits of the RapidIO technology. The ecosystem for RapidIO at 1G, 2.5G and 3.125G is large and growing, and has the features and cost/benefit proposition that makes it the right choice for chip-to-chip, board and backplane solutions.
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