SAN JOSE, Calif. — Intel Corp. this week asked board producers and their trade organizations to help develop the standard mechanical format for its emerging NGI/O technology. The request may help forge closer relations between the feuding VME International Trade Association (VITA) and the PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group (PICMG), which have pledged to work together to help create the new architecture.

Intel hopes that NGI/O, a serial I/O technique that reduces pin counts for high-speed communications, will become the mainstay for forthcoming generations of servers. It provides a way to communicate between CPUs and I/O cards, but Intel has made no attempt to create a physical architecture for holding those I/O boards.

At the Bus & Boards Conference this week in San Jose, Calif., an Intel NGI/O spokesman invited the board industry and its trade organizations to tackle the job of developing those mechanical specifications. A bus architecture that is started at this point, he noted, will have many of the features that have been slowly added to existing buses over the past couple of years.

"This will have critical advantages; it will have inherent hot pluggability and it will be very scalable," he said. "There will be no single point of failure, something that is not possible with parallel bus technology."

While the new serial technology will be radically different from its parallel predecessors, the physical format isn't likely to change all that much. Since NGI/O links need just four wires, the connector density will probably be 2 mm, most developers agree. The overall size will also remain constant.

"There's such an investment in 19-inch racks, injectors and other technologies that these become the defaults. Everyone is tooled for them," said Ray Alderman, executive director of VITA (Scottsdale, Ariz.). "We would certainly like to work with them to do the mechanics and build a high-speed architecture for the future. We have made a deal with the CompactPCI people to work closely together."

Joe Pavlat, president of PICMG (Wakefield, Mass.), added, "We think this makes a lot of sense; it's what the telecom guys want. The Eurocard format we're using fits well with NGI/O."

While the two groups will create a standard, a high percentage of boards produced today still use proprietary technologies, the Intel spokesman said. That may not change.

"We don't want to stop anyone from building to their own form factor if they have proprietary requirements," he said. "But we do want to make products available off the shelf."