May 21, 2008 -- The RapidIO Trade Association 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 new members. Driven in part by interest in the RapidIO Trade Association's 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."

"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 Corp. "As a provider of multi-core multi-threaded processing solutions, the RapidIO standard will be an integral component for our target market segments."

"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 SOCs."

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. Woodard, Product Manager in the Flow Control Management division at Integrated Device Technology (IDT), was previously Chair of the Trade Association's 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.