Rapid I/O at Design West

 We talked with the Rapid I/O group at Design West, formerly Embedded System Conference. The increase in infrastructure, especially in 3G and 4G wireless base stations, demands higher performance in the I/O sections of the system. RapidIO is deployed in virtually 100 percent of all 4G/LTE systems and 60 percent of new 3G systems worldwide. In China, RapidIO has captured almost 100 percent of the 3G market. The organization continues to grow as more vendors adopt the latest interface chips.

Serial RapidIO is a high-performance packet-switched interconnect technology providing measurable benefits versus 10 GbE. Its advantages in throughput, latency, jitter performance, quality of service, and overall system power utilization make it useful in wireless, imaging, video, computing, and industrial applications.

The third generation standard 10xN will launch this summer and will support 10Gb/s data rates with bandwidth up to 10 Gbps per lane and links up to 16 lanes wide. The logical and PHY sections are back compatible with the earlier generations. Equalization and pre-emphasis are set upon initial power-up and are automatically adjustable for any cable length up to 30 M. The interface does not use forward error correction nor any retries in sending data. It does have to send some packets at all times to keep the link alive, so cannot be powered down completely.

The standard is well suited for CPU-to-CPU interconnections and can operate on wire or through optical interconnections. The standard is supported by many vendors, with a wide collection of switches and bridges in many widths. In addition, there are interfaces to other interfaces like PCI-e. RapidIO is driven by the RapidIO Trade Association, a collaborative industry standards organization.