M-PCIe - Goin' mobile!

Ransom Stephens
EDN (July 15, 2013)

Like everything else in Silicon Valley, PCIe (peripheral component interconnect express) is goin’ mobile (cue up The Who). The big news at the June PCIe Special Interest Group Developers Conference was “mobile express,” M-PCIe.

The advantages of consolidating interconnect technology include the usual drivers—cheaper to develop, fast as you want, fewer specifications for developers to master, better power management—and you won’t need new drivers because every operating system already supports PCIe.

The essential ingredient to M-PCIe is incorporation of MIPI’s physical layer, M-PHY. It’s conceptually simple: replace the PCIe PHY layer with M-PHY and retain the rest of the PCIe protocol stack—data link layer, transaction layer, software layers and so forth.

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