Let’s Get Practical – How Can You Benefit from MIPI A-PHY?

Presented at Automotive SerDes Conference 2021 by Edo Cohen, co-chair, MIPI A-PHY Working Group

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Released to MIPI members in September 2020 and adopted by IEEE as a standard earlier this year, MIPI A-PHY® is poised to facilitate the next stages of the automotive industry’s evolution in autonomous driving. It offers high-performance - up to 16Gbps in v1.0, 32Gbps in v1.1, and a roadmap to 48Gbps and beyond. In addition to these ultra-high speeds, it offers a long reach, with up to 15 meters of cabling, while still providing an unprecedented packet error rate of 10-19.

But let’s go beyond the fact sheet. What are the real, tangible benefits that A-PHY will bring to your company, and to the automotive industry as a whole?

In this session, Edo Cohen dives deep into the advantages of MIPI A-PHY, which include:

• Reduction of total system cost – A-PHY will eliminate the need for bridge solutions currently required to connect your camera and display interfaces – such as MIPI CSI-2 and DSI-2, VESA DisplayPort and Embedded DisplayPort, as well as others – leading to considerable cost savings.
• Streamlined design – A-PHY includes automatic initialization and ECU kernel-level configuration, as well as advanced link diagnostics for easy maintenance. This is a true plug-and-play solution that relieves the system designer of heavy and complex tasks for the application level during development and runtime.
• Well-defined feature roadmap – A-PHY will be enhanced to address latest market demands and trends according to a well-defined release roadmap. Learn about the next version, A-PHY v1.1, which will double the maximum downlink data rate to 32 Gbps by supporting dual downlinks over star quad (STQ) cables. It also doubles the uplink speed and expands PAM4 encoding, allowing A-PHY implementation using lower cost cables and connectors. Backward and forward compatibility will be maintained.
• Ecosystem of suppliers - This is the first and only standardized SerDes protocol supporting higher layer MIPI camera and display protocols, offering economies of scale with multiple suppliers. It has a growing ecosystem emerging to back it, including sensor manufacturers, SOC providers, and test equipment vendors.

A-PHY is being implemented in current architectures, and engineering samples for A-PHY compliant chips are available by Q4 of this year. A-PHY’s widespread adoption will help the industry continue its evolution toward autonomous driving.