Based on industry-standard electrical specifications such as those for Ethernet, RapidIO can be used as a chip-to-chip, board-to-board, and chassis-to-chassis interconnect.

[1] The RapidIO Trade Association was formed in February 2000, and included telecommunications and storage OEMs as well as FPGA, processor, and switch companies.

The RapidIO specification revision 1.2, released in June 2002,[2] defined a serial interconnection based on the XAUI physical layer.

Devices based on this specification achieved significant commercial success within wireless baseband,[3] imaging and military computing.

RapidIO fabrics were originally designed to support connecting different types of processors from different manufacturers together in a single system.

This flexibility has driven the widespread use of RapidIO in wireless infrastructure equipment where there is a need to combine heterogeneous, DSP, FPGA and communication processors together in a tightly coupled system with low latency and high reliability.

Hence, capable of providing 5Gbs per lane connections in each direction to its north, south, east and west neighbors.

Also, using an open modular data center and compute platform,[12] a heterogeneous HPC system has showcased the low latency attribute of RapidIO to enable real-time analytics.

[13] In March 2015 a top-of-rack switch was announced to drive RapidIO into mainstream data center applications.

[14] The interconnect or "bus" is one of the critical technologies in the design and development of spacecraft avionic systems that dictate its architecture and level of complexity.

A viable option for the design and development of these next generation architectures is to leverage existing commercial protocols capable of accommodating high levels of data transfer.

Independent trade study results by NGSIS member companies demonstrated the superiority of RapidIO over other existing commercial protocols, such as InfiniBand, Fibre Channel, and 10G Ethernet.

The first is an acknowledge ID (ackID), which is the link-specific, unique, 5-, 6-, or 12-bit value that is used to track packets exchanged on a link.

RapidIO switches support a standard programming model for the routing table, which simplifies system control.

Portions of the destination ID of each packet can be used to identify specific pieces of virtual hardware within the endpoint.

The RapidIO logical layer is composed of several specifications, each providing packet formats and protocols for different transaction semantics.

The logical I/O layer defines packet formats for read, write, write-with-response, and various atomic transactions.

Examples of atomic transactions are set, clear, increment, decrement, swap, test-and-swap, and compare-and-swap.

The logical level retry response allows multiple senders to access a small number of shared reception resources, leading to high throughput with low power.

Each transfer is associated with a Class of Service and Stream Identifier, enabling thousands of unique flows between endpoints.

The Data Streaming specification also defines Extended Header flow control packet formats and semantics to manage performance within a client-server system.

RapidIO supports high availability, fault tolerant system design, including hot swap.

[citation needed] PCI Express is targeted at the host to peripheral market, as opposed to embedded systems.

To meet these challenges, systems based on Ethernet require significant amounts of processing power, software and memory throughout the network to implement protocols for flow control, data transfer, and packet routing.

RapidIO is optimized for energy efficient, low latency, processor-to-processor communication in fault tolerant embedded systems that span geographic areas of less than one kilometer.

[17] Time Triggered Ethernet is a competing technology for more complex backplane (VPX) and backbone applications for space (launchers and human-rated integrated avionics).