Celebrating Success

RapidIO Interconnect Standard: Easy as Buying a Car

Bill Beane, Senior Product Manager, IDT

Any new interconnect standard has to go through a start-up process, building awareness, knowledge, and preference among suppliers and customers. In many ways, it’s analogous to buying a car. First, you look through a bunch of brochures. Then you want to go see it in person – walk around it, sit in it, kick the tires. If that feels right, you take it for a test drive; put it through its paces. Finally, when you’re satisfied it meets your needs and your budget; you drive it home from the lot.

In order for a new interconnect standard to be successful, it has to be able to support this full process – ultimately, “driving it home” translates to design wins, to systems being built using the new interconnect. This process applies to suppliers as well as to consumers. In our case, we at IDT studied the RapidIO technology thoroughly before deciding to become a vendor. As the developer of integrated mixed-signal solutions for wireless infrastructure and other embedded processing applications, we wanted to make sure that it was the right fit as a technology on which to build our enhanced switching and memory solutions.

We were satisfied that it provided the right balance of cost and performance, with the flexibility and scalability needed in the markets and applications we serve, and that it had the right ecosystem of key suppliers providing components, hardware, software, and diagnostic tools to give it the critical mass needed to sustain itself across multiple generations of platforms. This process done, our “test drive” complete, we made our own decision to “buy,” through incorporating Serial RapidIO in our pre-processing switch devices and serial buffer solutions, providing enhanced support for DSP and other end-point clusters in a variety of applications.

Having become one of many RapidIO vendors, we in IDT then turned our attention to supporting the evaluation and purchase process for our own customers. Our specifications, applications notes, and technical articles provide for “brochure study,” while our simulation tools, development platforms, and advanced software solutions provide ample ability to “kick the tires” and “test-drive” our components and the underlying RapidIO technology. We see this going on throughout the ecosystem – and the success of the standard is apparent in the rapidly increasing number of customers and applications that we are supporting. Our customers have become savvy consumers – they know what they want in their systems, they know the capabilities of RapidIO technology as it applies to their applications, and they’ve checked out other options. They’re giving our products a thorough check-out, and they’re driving off our lot well-satisfied with the purchase they’ve made.

To make a standard work, there has to be a sustainable market and a strong ecosystem. RapidIO products are readily available through multiple suppliers, and deliver on the performance and cost requirements for embedded applications. From wireless and wireline communications to computing and storage and even into critical embedded applications such as military sensor platforms and medical imaging, the interconnect is providing system-level features and benefits that far outstrip the abilities of non-tailored standards. If you haven’t taken the chance to do so yet, you owe it to yourself to “test drive” some RapidIO solutions. We’re confident you’ll drive home happy, another satisfied customer. You can find IDT RapidIO-based products at www.idt.com, and the RapidIO Trade Association maintains a product showcase of member companies’ solutions at www.rapidio.org.