This International Standard applies to physical connectors and cables, electrical properties, and logical protocols for point-to-point serial scalable interconnect, operating at speeds of 10 Mbit/s to 200 Mbit/s and at 1 Gbit/s in copper and optic technologies (as developed in Open Microprocessor Systems Initiative/Heterogeneous InterConnect Project (OMI/HIC)).

The object of this International Standard is to enable high-performance, scalable, modular, parallel systems to be constructed with low system integration cost; to support communications systems fabric; to provide a transparent implementation of a range of high-level protocols (communications, e.g. ATM, message passing, shared memory transactions, etc.), and to support links between heterogeneous systems.