RapidIO group releases interconnect spec

The RapidIO Trade Association, a non-profit organization formed to drive the adoption of an open standard interconnect architecture, has announced that its serial chip and board-level interconnect specification has been released to the general industry.

Combined with the RapidIO parallel specification completed last year, the availability of Serial RapidIO allows designers to standardize on a single interconnect technology for networking, telecommunications and other embedded applications.

The Serial RapidIO is a low pin-count and switch fabric serial interconnect for applications such as DSP farms and serial back plane applications. Serial RapidIO leverages industry-standard signaling technology found in Fibre Channel, 10Gb Ethernet XAUI interfaces and Infiniband, and includes a low-power transmission mode not usually found in other standards.

Products based on Serial RapidIO are expected to be sampled to the industry in early 2003.