RapidIO is carving a niche in telecom and military environments. For instance, Mercury Computer Systems and Tundra Semiconductor have teamed up to create the Ensemble serial RapidIO Advanced Telecom Computing Architecture (AdvancedTCA) development system.
The Ensemble system was demonstrated at the Motorola Smart Network Developer Forum (SNDF), held in Dallas in April. The demonstration unit employed five mesh-enabled carrier boards, each with an on-board aggregate bandwidth of 100 Gbits/s.
The carrier boards feature three mezzanine sites for VITA 42 standard-based, processor XMCs or front-panel I/O. They also have three parallel interfaces and one serial interface. The system can handle 15 XMC cards plus five additional RapidIO endpoints. PowerQUICC III processors were shown in the demonstration.
The Tundra Semiconductor Tsi500 Multiport Switch chip integrates four, 8-bit full-duplex RapidIO interfaces that transfer up to 1 Gbyte/s. Parallel RapidIO, used on the XMC interface, can be transparently linked to serial RapidIO found on the backplane.
Mercury Computer Systemswww.mc.comTundra Semiconductorwww.tundra.com