The RapidIO™ interconnect architecture, announced in February 2000, provides a new, high-performance interconnect for board-to-board and chip-to-chip communications within embedded computer systems. Targeted for an initial bandwidth in excess of 1 Gigabyte per second per device pair, RapidIO provides the data bandwidth required for increasingly complex applications running on ever faster processors, and requiring ever more data to move between multiple processing stages.RapidIO is initially targeted at embedded applications with the highest data communication requirements, such as networking, wireless communication infrastructure, digital video broadcasting, medical diagnostic imaging, military image and signal processing, and semiconductor wafer inspection. The specification will be controlled by the RapidIO Trade Association, making the RapidIO architecture the only open standard to directly address the intra-system interconnect requirements for all of these markets.