Communications-standards update

The Wi-Fi Alliance (www.wi-fi.org) has replaced the security scheme for the recently broken WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) standard for 802.11 wireless networks. Many industry participants considered the old standard to have been inadequate. The new standard, WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access), will provide stronger encryption technologies through TKIP (Temporal Key Integrity Protocol) and improve user authentication through 802.1x and EAP (Extensible Authentication Protocol). The alliance expects the scheme to appear in products as early as this quarter in the form of software upgrades. For more information, visit the alliance's Web site.

The Optical Internetworking Forum (www.oiforum.com) has announced the SxI-5 implementation agreement, which addresses common electrical and jitter specifications for interfaces using 2.5- to 3.125-Gbps parallel datapaths. SxI-5 forms the electrical foundation of the SPI-5 and SFI-5 interfaces. The forum has also approved the SFI-4, Phase 2, VSR4-05 (very-short-reach) and VSR5 physical- and link-layer implementation agreements for tunable lasers.

The PICMG (PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group, www.picmg.org) has approved the release of PCIMG 2.20 Revision 1.0 of its CompactPCI serial-mesh-backplane specification, which defines high-speed serial fabrics for CompactPCI platforms. PICMG has also initiated the development of PICMG 3.4, which will define the electrical environment for PCI Express as a fabric interface for AdvancedTCA-system applications.

The PCI-SIG (PCI Special Interest Group, www.pcisig.org) has begun work on PCI-X 1066, a backward-compatible follow-on to PCI-X 266 and PCI-X 533. PCI-X 1066 will enable more than 1 billion transfers per second for a sustainable push-rate bandwidth of 8.5 Gbytes/sec. The group is also considering adding enhanced power management, full isochronous support, redundant paths, and modular form factors to the spec.