The Virtual Pipe I/O (VPIO) architecture enables I/O to scale with processor/memory performance and allows product designers to develop new classes of product.

Unlike almost every other aspect of mobile and computer hardware design, the connector has remained undisrupted for decades which has put a limit on innovations within application designs. EMI, RFI, and ESD design issues with connectors have only gotten worse as communication speeds have increased, managing protocols and signals both internally and externally has become more challenging, devices have gotten smaller, and too many protocol connections limit system scalability and grows the overall cost. Mechanical connectors cannot scale with the increasing processor and memory performance.

“With our Kiss Connector, Keyssa transformed an industrial-era mechanical technology into a solid-state device,” says Eric Almgren, CEO of Keyssa. “With VPIO, we are reaching further into the system to address the source of I/O shortcomings and solve the fundamental issue of I/O inefficiencies.”

Keyssa has made available its VPIO architecture to help address the issue of protocol scale in SoCs, processors, and system architecture. VPIO has been designed to take in low- and high-speed signals from any protocol and aggregate them into one virtual channel over a “virtual pipe,” transmit the aggregated signals to their destination and disaggregate on the other side. The separate pads, pins, and PHYs required for specific protocols can now be combined into one pipe and transmitted over one or more standard SerDes, which increases overall system performance and decreases cost.

“Every chip and system designer struggles with an immutable fact: there is no Moore’s Law for pins,” says Ajay Bhatt, former chief I/O architect for Intel and coarchitect, VPIO, Keyssa. “And with the myriad of low- and high-speed protocols that exist in every processor and every system, I/O cannot scale with the processor and memory performance. VPIO provides a viable and effective way for I/O to scale by replacing pads with gates, providing both I/O flexibility and scalability.”

The KSS104M, the latest in Keyssa’s Kiss Connectivity solutions and the only solid-state contactless connector on the market, is now in mass production. The KSS104M is a tiny, low-cost, low-power, solid-state electromagnetic connector that enables large amounts of data to be securely transferred between devices at very high speeds. The KSS104M can be easily integrated into customers’ end products without requiring any changes to their software or firmware, by supporting industry standard high-speed data and video protocols.

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