M-PHY benefits and challenges

Ashraf Takla, Mixel Inc. and Cedric Bertholom ST-Ericsson
EETimes (4/11/2011 9:37 AM EDT)

The MIPI Alliance was created in 2003 to benefit the entire mobile industry by establishing standards for hardware and software interfaces in mobile devices. One critical component of any mobile device is the physical layer (PHY). The first PHY specification that the MIPI Alliance released in 2009 was the D-PHY. The D-PHY currently operates up to 1Gbps and supports both camera serial interface (CSI-2) and display serial interface (DSI), which are increasingly used in both feature and smart phones.

To enable next generation smart phones and tablets, the MIPI Alliance is releasing the M-PHY®1.0 specification by second quarter of 2011, and plans to release versions 2.0 and 3.0 later in the year to support data rates up to 6Gbps at considerably low power. The M-PHY is the most versatile PHY specification available for adoption today.

Benefits and challenges, two faces of the same coin

The M-PHY supports plesiochronous as well as mesochronous operations, speeds from 10Kbps up to data rates of 6Gbps while maintaining low power operation, achieving low electro-magnetic-interference (EMI), supporting a variable number of links, sub-links, and data lanes, multiple media options, and a growing number of use-case in traditional and non-traditional mobile applications.

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