AUSTIN, TEXAS – May 20, 2008 – The RapidIO® Trade Association, dedicated to driving the development and adoption of the RapidIO interconnect standard, today announced several milestones underscoring its position as the preferred choice of embedded designers, including members, its latest technology roadmap, and a new Marketing Working Group Chair.
“The versatility, performance and breadth of hardware and software solutions supporting the RapidIO standard make it the preferred solution for next-generation systems in a variety of market segments,” said RapidIO Trade Association Executive Director Tom Cox. “Our newest member companies bring valuable expertise and perspective to our organization while clearly recognizing the value of our ecosystem and the opportunity to contribute to its future direction.”
The RapidIO Trade Association ecosystem grew with the addition of GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms, HDL Design House, Motorola, Nortel, Qualcomm, RMI Corporation, and Wintegra as members of the RapidIO Trade Association. Driven in part by interest in the RapidIO Trade Associations Bus Functional Model (BFM), these companies are actively working to develop the standard to meet the high performance needs of the embedded market globally.
Ecosystem Growth
“Serial RapidIO has helped us deliver the leading edge performance our customers require in demanding applications such as radar, sonar and communications processing,” said Mike Stern, Product Manager for Multiprocessing at GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms. “The extensive ecosystem of merchant silicon, IP and software products that Serial RapidIO brings with it provides us with the flexibility to develop a broad range of powerful solutions. Joining the RapidIO Trade Association demonstrates our commitment to the technology over the long term.”
GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms, a joint venture between General Electric (NYSE: GE) and FANUC LTD of Japan, is a high-performance technology company and a global provider of hardware, software, services, expertise and experience in automation and embedded computing.
“We are pleased to be joining the RapidIO Trade Association and look forward to becoming active members as we expand our product offerings for next-generation enterprise and infrastructure solutions,” said Nazar Zaidi, vice president of engineering, Communication Processor Solutions, RMI. “As a provider of multi-core multi-threaded processing solutions, the RapidIO standard will be an integral component for our target market segments.”
RMI Corporation is a fabless semiconductor company providing highly integrated, feature-rich products ranging from power-optimized Super System-on-a-Chip (SuperSOC™) solutions to High-Performance Processors for the Digital Consumer, Wireless, Networking and Security markets. RMI offers a broad platform of advanced MIPS®-compatible processing solutions supporting frequencies from 300MHz to 1.2 GHz.
“With access to the RapidIO standard, HDL Design House is interested in offering complete verification solution for Serial RapidIO design and systems. We hope that the RapidIO Trade Association members will recognize the quality of verification solutions based on Serial RapidIO technology that HDL Design House offers,” said Predrag Markovic, president and CEO, HDL Design House. “We have become a RapidIO Trade Association member with the aim, by directly communicating with the creators and users of this standard, to jointly achieve the main goal – greater use of the RapidIO technology on SoC. The RapidIO Trade Association offers its members a wide range of activities and marketing opportunities which we found very beneficial.”
HDL Design House develops IP Cores, eVC and SystemVerilog-based verification solutions and provides complete design and verification services for complex SoC projects. The company also delivers VHDL/VITAL models used by major SoC product developers.
The BFM provides interoperability and compliance checking and is supplied as a modular behavioral C model and provide a set of features and functions for simulating and verifying RapidIO systems of arbitrary complexity. The BFM is available to RapdIO Trade Association members in source code or object code form and is designed as a flexible tool for the development, evaluation and verification of RapidIO interface products. For more information visit www.rapidio.org/education/documents/RTA_BFM_doc[…]
Technology Roadmap
The RapidIO Trade Association also unveiled its new technology roadmap that provides details about RapidIO Specification Rev. 2.0, and previews the development of Specification Rev. 3.0, which will continue to be defined collaboratively over the next 24 months. While the current standard (Specification Rev. 1.3) will continue to dominate embedded applications for the foreseeable future, silicon using the latest revision is expected to debut in 2009. Details can be found at www.rapidio.org/education/Roadmap/
In addition, the RapidIO Trade Association announced that B. Keith Woodard has been named Marketing Work Group Chair. Mr. Woodard, Product Manager in the Flow Control Management division at Integrated Device Technology (IDT), was previously Chair of the Trade Associations Global Design Conferences, which provided detailed educational and design information to RapidIO technology users around the world. He has over 20 years of experience in engineering, marketing, and product management positions at IDT and is currently involved with the IDT RapidIO solutions for wireless infrastructure applications.
“IDT has seen market acceptance for the RapidIO interconnect dramatically accelerate over the past few years, and we feel the trade association marketing efforts have played a significant role in this development,” said Woodard. “This is an exciting time to be helping with the marketing working group as RapidIO expands into new markets and applications. We welcome the addition of new member companies and look forward to the new technical capabilities of RapidIO 2.0.”
About the RapidIO Standard
The RapidIO standard is the embedded interconnect developed by the embedded market specifically for embedded applications. This ISO-certified, open-standard enables best-in-class quality of service and performance in multi-host embedded processor applications – from components to systems – that require reliable, high speed, cost-effective embedded connectivity. The RapidIO interconnect standard seamlessly enables the chip-to-chip, board-to-board, control, backplane and data plane interconnections needed in high-performance networking, communications and embedded systems.
The RapidIO Trade Association enables, supports and drives the development of the RapidIO ecosystem, and provides the information and resources OEMs need to deliver better solutions, faster. Membership in the RapidIO Trade Association provides the inside track on information, the opportunity to shape specifications, access to pooled resources, and superior overall market awareness. Detailed information on the RapidIO specification, products, design tools, member companies, and membership is available at www.RapidIO.org.