About Reflective Memory Device Communications

The Reflective Memory communications enabler can be used to support communications with other devices with Reflective Memory cards installed including GE’s PACSystem RX7i and RX3i Device Controllers with RMX or CMX cards installed.

The communication network using reflective memory is based on several reflective memory (RFM) cards connected via fiber optic cables into a physical ring. Each RFM card automatically takes fiber channel data transfer’s that received on the RX side of its connection, transfers that packet’s data into its internal memory space, and then re-transmits that same packet on the TX side of its connection to other nodes.  Once a RFM interface receives a packet with the same Network ID, it does not re-transmit that packet removing it from the network.

All reflective memory cards run autonomously; they are standalone communication processors. The built-in firmware and processor ensures that whenever data is written to the internal memory space of the card, this written data is populated via ultra-fast fiber optic network to all other connected reflective memory cards.

The CIMPLICITY Reflective Memory device communication enabler can read and write to the internal memory space available on the reflective memory card inside the PC. Because the network creates a shared memory space between different types of applications with no explicit network control overhead, if multiple devices are specified to write to the same memory address within the reflective memory space, the applications should implement a feature or control method within the application to coordinate the writes.