Meticom: Bridging FPGAs & MIPI-Enabled Devices

Al Gharakhanian, Upside Sales
10/22/2013 11:50 AM EDT

MIPI, which stands for Mobile Industry Processor Interface, was originally conceived as a low-power interface intended to interconnect functional units (e.g., camera sensors and displays) within handsets.

The popularity of MIPI has mushroomed in recent years -- many component suppliers have adopted the standard and debuted a variety of MIPI-enabled devices, including camera sensors, displays, and application processors. Although a strong interest to tap into the mobile market is the primary reason for such a move, the MIPI trend has caught the attention of designers building systems for non-mobile markets, such as automotive, industrial, and medical. The rationale for this is that MIPI-enabled products are intended for high-volume mobile markets and so they are bound to be cheaper.

This has led to an interesting dilemma. Since MIPI as an interface was never intended to serve non-mobile applications, interfacing to FPGAs was never made a priority. This makes perfect sense, since the majority of FPGAs are not well-suited for use in high-volume mobile devices. On the other hand, FPGAs are quite common in medical, industrial, and automotive applications. The end result is that the lure of using low-cost MIPI-enabled devices and the need to connect them to FPGAs has forced designers to look for bridging solutions.

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