New Developments in MIPI's High-Speed Automotive Sensor Connectivity Framework

By Ariel Lasry, MIPI Alliance
EEtimes Europe (June 18, 2024)

Higher link speeds, security and a compliance program have been added to the MIPI Automotive SerDes Solutions framework.

Automotive image sensors, which include cameras, LiDAR and radar, play a critical role in advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving. Today, the systems that deliver advanced SAE Level 2 features typically utilize a combination of up to 10 camera and radar sensors. This number is expected to go up significantly to enable higher levels of automation, potentially requiring as many as 45 image and other sensors to deliver the most advanced SAE Level 3 (and beyond) features. As the number of image sensors in vehicles has increased, the MIPI Camera Serial Interface 2 (CSI-2) standardized image sensor protocol has become the core imaging protocol used within automotive systems.

The need to integrate these greater numbers of image sensors, with ever-higher resolutions, creates multiple design challenges, including connecting multi-gigabit image data streams to application processors and processing the huge volume of raw image data generated by the sensors. To meet these challenges, vehicles are becoming increasingly software-oriented, enabling sensor fusion, where powerful algorithms combine data from multiple image sensors into a single data model of the environment around a vehicle. The industry is also developing innovative electrical and electronic (E/E) architectures that leverage the latest high-speed automotive networking protocols.

To enable high-speed, software-oriented architectures, the automotive industry is evolving away from the domain-specific architectures of today and toward cross-domain centralized architectures. These centralized architectures use just a few powerful computers compared with the high number of individual electronic control units (ECUs) used in today’s domain-specific architectures. Several powerful vehicle computers will connect to all the vehicle image sensors via a small number of zonal ECUs, not only enabling software-defined vehicles but also allowing wiring harnesses to be simplified for weight and cost savings.

To support these evolving E/E architectures, MIPI developed MIPI Automotive SerDes Solutions (MASS), a framework for connecting sensors and displays over long cable lengths with functional safety (FuSa) and security built in. Since its initial release in 2020, several components within the MASS framework have evolved, and in 2024, major advancements include the addition of image sensor security functionality, an even faster MIPI A-PHY v2.0 serializer/deserializer (SerDes) physical layer and the further development of an A-PHY compliance program.

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