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A Look at MIPI in Automotive: New White Paper
Andy Huckridge, MIPI Technical Marketing Engineer : 8 October 2019
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A new MIPI white paper, Driving The Wires of Automotive, explores the evolving automotive industry and the Alliance’s catalyzing role in the unfolding transformation by helping to define the next generation of automotive electronics interfaces.
MIPI Alliance announced the white paper in an 8 October press release, along with key MIPI advancements and activities for enhancing advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), autonomous driving systems (ADS) and other automotive capabilities.
Influences such as the proliferation of electric vehicles, the trend toward vehicle automation, tighter safety and fuel economy standards, and new ownership models such as car sharing all point toward a future of smarter, connected and more automated cars leveraging more electronic components. As described in the white paper, several MIPI interface specifications from the mobile ecosystem are already being applied to enable innovative automotive applications, among them:
- MIPI CSI-2SM for cameras, lidar and radar sensors
- MIPI DSI-2SM for dashboard, rear and head-up displays
- MIPI C-PHYSM and MIPI D-PHYSM, short-reach physical interfaces for CSI-2 and DSI-2
- MIPI I3C®, a sensor and general-purpose data and control interface
- MIPI RFFESM, for front-end control within a wireless module
- MIPI SoundWire®, for interfacing audio within a module
- MIPI UniPro® and MIPI M-PHY®, for Universal Flash Storage (UFS)
The paper takes an especially in-depth look at the forthcoming MIPI A-PHYSM physical layer specification and its critical technical advantages. Development of A-PHY was initiated in 2017 to facilitate the automotive industry’s convergence of multiple proprietary interfaces on a single unifying standard for long-reach asymmetric point-to-point communications in the automobile. MIPI A-PHY offers a flexible, future-oriented solution for the industry’s “long-reach, high-speed challenge” of connecting the various speed needs of electronic components across the vehicle.
In this way, A-PHY stands to deliver the same breakthrough benefits in automotive that MIPI Alliance specifications brought to the mobile space in the mid-2000s: accelerating innovation and lowering costs across the industry ecosystem through economies of scale.