EDA Café Industry Predictions – MIPI Alliance / MIPI I3C

With more widespread adoption of the Internet of Things (IoT)—including for industrial, medical and other applications—it is clear that smaller form factors and the need for speed and efficiency will continue to provide challenges to product developers and designers.

Interface specifications from the MIPI Alliance have been engineered and refined through mobile’s 3G and 4G eras specifically to meet these sorts of challenges of the unfolding 5G world.

Take MIPI I3C, for example.

MIPI I3C was launched in 2017 to streamline sensor integration in the small, space-constrained form factors of IoT devices, as well as smartphones, wearables and other mobile-connected products.

The recently released first update to the specification, MIPI I3C v1.1, connects peripherals to an application processor and delivers a dramatic data rate increase, as well as a host of new features—grouped addressing, enhanced error detection/recovery, slave reset, comprehensive flow control, outsider end transfer, and new common command capabilities, among them—to enhance resiliency and reliability.

In v1.1’s new HDR-BT mode, I3C’s data transport modes can be operated across multiple lanes. By simply adding additional lanes, developers and designers can achieve close to 100 MHz (as opposed to topping out at about 25 MHz). It is unnecessary to implement advanced general-purpose input/outputs (GPIOs), more advanced protocols or faster timing. The capability for extensible use of the extra bus lanes conveys a dramatic rate bump, and, still, the interface remains extremely simple to implement and use. Speed can be doubled, for example, by merely extending from two to three wires.

Indeed, every MIPI specification is optimized to achieve high bandwidth for enabling feature-rich, data-intensive applications, as well as to deliver fundamental performance characteristics of low power to preserve battery life and low electromagnetic interference (EMI) to minimize interference among radios and device subsystems. These commitments are intended to keep MIPI specifications poised not only to support 5G and its ongoing proliferation of industrial, medical and other IoT applications, but also to future proof for evolving requirements on the horizon.

Tags: Predictions

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