Only designers of chip-to-chip or backplane interconnects and their managers were selected for the survey. Respondents said that they are involved in specifying some form of interconnect product, including merchant silicon, ASICs, FPGAs, serdes, IP cores or design tools. Only people who are working now or plan to work within two years on interconnects running at 1 Gbit/second or faster were selected to take part.

Respondents came from various industries, with 35.4 percent saying they worked in wired networking systems and 22.6 percent saying they designed wireless networking gear. Thirty-one percent design servers and 16.5 percent design client computers. Thirty-three percent said they design storage networking equipment or hard disk drives. Most respondents — about 55 percent — said they have some involvement in embedded systems design, ranging from military (21 percent) to industrial (13.6) to consumer (11.9) or medical (9.9).

Hardware design engineers made up the largest group of respondents (45.7 percent), followed by engineering managers (15.2 percent), systems architects (14.4 percent), project leaders (6.2 percent) and signal integrity/EMC engineers (5.3 percent).

Three-quarters of respondents said they directly take part in making decisions about which high-speed interconnect solutions to choose. Just under half (43.6 percent) said they recommend or select interconnect technology vendors. A third (36.2 percent) said they design high-speed backplanes, and 30.5 percent said they design chips that implement high-speed links.