Enabling the construction of high-performance, scalable, modular, parallel systems with low system integration cost is discussed. Complementary use of physical connectors and cables, electrical properties, and logical protocols for point-to-point serial scalable interconnect, operating at speeds of 10-200 Mb/s and at 1 Gb/s in copper and optic technologies, is described.

Physical connectors and cables, electrical properties, and logical protocols for point to point serial scaleable interconnect, operating at speeds of 10-200 Mbit/sec and at 1 Gbit/sec in copper and optic technologies (as developed in Open Microprocessor systems Initiative/heterogeneous InterConnect Project (OMI/HIC).

To enable high-performance, scaleable, modular, parallel systems to be constructed with low system integration cost; to support communications system fabric; to provide a transparent implementation of a range of high level protocols (communications, e.g. Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM), message passing, shared memory transactions e.g. SCI, Futurebus+, etc.; to support links between heterogeneous systems.