I started my career as an R&D engineer for embedded systems, then transitioned into applications engineering and product marketing roles in the semiconductor industry. With my systems knowledge, I have led many IC design wins that have enabled portable applications such as cellular phones, digital cameras and eBooks.MIPI Protocols usage in Handsets
Posted by Hezi Saar on September 1st, 2011
I wanted to share this graph with you that shows projections of ICs employing MIPI protocols and used in handsets, courtesy of ABI research and IP Nest, and discuss what it means.
Here’s how these numbers were calculated:
IP Nest used initial data from ABI Research for IC shipments and handset shipments, then added the “MIPI powered IC” numbers (RED line) based on the MIPI IP survey done by IP Nest.
What it tells us that the popular MIPI interfaces are seeing strong adoption in the market and that almost 100% of the worldwide IC shipments in handsets will be using some MIPI interface in 2013.
As you know there are many protocols under the MIPI Alliance so which MIPI interfaces see these strong adoption?
These are the interfaces that their specification is completed and already implementated by mainstream application processors and baseband processors serving the mobile market.
For application processors, these are CSI-2 and DSI for camera and display interfaces that use the MIPI D-PHY for the physical layer. And for baseband processors these are DigRF 3G and DigRF v4 which uses MIPI M-PHY.
Here are a few examples from mainstream vendors used in several mobile devices currently shipping in high volume:
nVidia Tegra-2 uses DSI and CSI-2 for standardized display and camera interfaces. And the new Freescale i.MX6 series Quad-core SoC that uses the DSI and CSI-2 interfaces which expects to start shipping in volume soon following an impressively short silicon bring-up.
STe M570 baseband and RF platform that support the DigRF interface for standard baseband to RFIC connectivity.
There are many more providers of application processors and baseband processors that use CSI-2, DSI, DigRF 3G and DigRF v4 as their standard offering. Feel free to reference them in the comments or send to me offline so I can share with the readers.
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Great summary Hezi! Are there any other AP or BB vendors adopting MIPI M-PHY? I know TI has MIPI’s and C2C on their OMAP, any others?
Hey Steven
Yes, there are many users of M-PHY but this is not public information so I can’t share. We carry M-PHY in our IP product portfolio therefore we can say that M-PHY is being used. I’ll try to point to public information about other SoC’s using M-PHY in future posts.
Thanks for the feedback
Hezi
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