1.5. THE MARKET PROBLEM

Among the products of the various companies that together supply electronic components to the embedded marketplace, there is no single ubiquitous bus solution that may be used to connect all devices together. Many vendors offer proprietary bus or interconnect technology on their devices. This creates a market for glue chips that are used to bridge the various devices together to build systems. Common glue chip technologies are ASIC and FPGA devices, with the choice of solution typically guided by economic considerations.

The number of unique buses or interconnects in the system increases the complexity of the system design as well as the verification effort. In addition to the device buses, system developers often also develop their own buses and interconnect technologies because the device buses do not offer the features or capabilities required in their systems.

The embedded market is different from the personal computer market. In the personal computer market there is a single platform architecture that has been stretched to meet the needs of notebook, desktop and server applications. The embedded equipment market is quite different in character from the personal computer market. It is also generally older with legacy telecommunications systems architectures stretching back forty years. The technical approaches taken for embedded equipment reflect the availability of components, historical system architectures and competitive pressures. The resulting system designs are quite different from that of a personal computer.

The embedded market also does not have as much dependency on ISA compatibility, favoring architectures such as ARM, PowerPC and MIPS as opposed to the X86 architecture that is predominant on the desktop.

Despite the disparate technical problems being solved by embedded equipment manufacturers and the variety of components and architectures available to produce solutions, there is still a desire for the use of standard interconnects to simplify the development task, reduce cost and speed time to market. This desire for standard embedded system interconnects is the primary impetus behind the development of the RapidIO interconnect technology.