High Speed Interconnects
This is definitely one area where floor displays was rather limited. Of course most PCs being used have PCI Express inside and USB 3.0 was in most of these places as well. Xilinx was supporting these technologies as well as any other high speed serial interface you can think of including HDMI using their FPGA development platforms.
We did stop off at the USB booth area and got an eyeful of USB 3.0 technology including some Displaylink products. Running displays off USB 3.0 should get very interesting this year.
One of the interesting things coming to USB 3.0 is bidirectional power distribution. This means a USB 3.0 display could plug into a wall outlet and provide power to a tablet or smartphone that it is connected to. Of course, the reverse is true as well so a tablet's battery could drive display as it does now for devices like disk and flash drives. You will be hearing more about USB 3.0 from me this year.
All the major electronics players were in the backrooms if not out on the floor. I spoke with IDT'sPresident and CEO, Ted Tewksbury, about Serial Rapid IO. They have a PCI Express to Serial RapidIO bridge chip (see Innovative Platforms Enlist To Serve High-Performance Military Computing Highlights) that allows PCI Express platforms to coexist on a Serial RapidIO fabric. Curtiss-Wright Controls uses it on their CHAMP-AV8 with dual Intel Core-i7 processors.
Other vendors like Mercury Computers use FPGAs to link PCI Express to Serial RapidIO. Mercury's Protocol Offload Engine Technology (POET) protocol-agnostic, multi-standard switch fabric is used in FPGAs on their boards to perform a similar bridging function. The advantage is POET only uses part of the FPGA and it handles any fabric, not just PCI Express (see Innovative Platforms Enlist To Serve High-Performance Military Computing Highlights).