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.
To read the full article, click here
Related Semiconductor IP
- MIPI UniPro Software Stack
- MIPI SoundWire Slave Controller 1.2
- MIPI SoundWire Master Controller 1.2
- MIPI SLIMbus Software Stack
- MIPI SLIMbus Hardware Validation Platform
Related White Papers
- DSP or FPGA? How to choose the right device
- Latest Version of Interface Protocol Speeds Mobile Device Development, Lowers e-BoM
- M31 on the Specification and Development of MIPI Physical Layer
- Integrating VESA DSC and MIPI DSI in a System-on-Chip (SoC): Addressing Design Challenges and Leveraging Arasan IP Portfolio
Latest White Papers
- Boosting RISC-V SoC performance for AI and ML applications
- e-GPU: An Open-Source and Configurable RISC-V Graphic Processing Unit for TinyAI Applications
- How to design secure SoCs, Part II: Key Management
- Seven Key Advantages of Implementing eFPGA with Soft IP vs. Hard IP
- Hardware vs. Software Implementation of Warp-Level Features in Vortex RISC-V GPU