RapidIO Gen 2 Products Are Here!

By Tom Cox, RapidIO Trade Association

RapidIO is today broadly supported in MIPS, ARM, PowerPC, and many DSP and programmable logic based processors. TI and Freescale continue to strategically support RapidIO, and now many other vendors have announced CPUs and DSPs based on strong OEM demand.

RapidIO Generation 2 products have also been announced recently. They not only add higher speed links, but also provide advanced flow control and data management features not offered by any other interconnect. Although faster signaling is important for interconnects, efficient use of the signaling to achieve high data rates is also critical. For example, a 40 GHz signaling rate is meaningless if the effective data rate is much lower as is true with many interconnects. 

RapidIO has low overhead and very low latency. The protocol is hardware based between the links and across the system. Unlike Ethernet, there is no TCP/IP software stack to slow the system down and require processing at both ends. RapidIO can therefore move small and medium payloads much faster than Ethernet, and such payloads are the most common types of data in embedded systems. RapidIO can easily transport data rates of 10G in Gen 1, and over 20G in Gen2. And Gen 2 adds important options for deeper flow control and the industry’s best data management features.

Announced products supporting Gen 2 include IDT switches, Freescale processors, Altera FPGAs, and RapidFET development tools. Look for further announcements in the coming months from the strong and growing RapidIO ecosystem. RapidIO continues to build on its 10 years of success as a high-performance interconnect for a wide variety of processors, systems, and applications. 

Tom Cox is Executive Director of the RapidIO Trade Association.  You can reach him at tom.cox@rapidio.org. 

RapidIO is a trademark of the RapidIO Trade Association.