One-Stop Shop for Complete MIPI IP Solution

As we know mobile industry is one of the fastest growing in the electronics arena, and it has led to the emergence of several standards of interfaces between processors, devices, storage, camera, keyboard and so on. The interfaces can involve hardware as well as software and can be complex. The standards are still evolving, often leading to interoperability problems. We know, MIPI (Mobile Industry Processor Interface) Alliance, with several of its working groups is promoting open specifications for such interfaces. Well, that can ease out the interoperability problems and also optimality in terms of low power and pin count between multiple interconnections of mixed-signal devices, still one (the SoC integrator) has to deal with searching right vendors for different components; analog, IP, software with right standards; and this is a significant task considering plenty of suppliers with various offerings on various standards available in the MIPI IP market.

What’s the alternative? Close on a vendor who can provide all ranges of hardware, software, interfaces with matching versions of standards and in fact can act as your design partner to accelerate the process. When I came across the website of Arasan Chip Systems, there I found a whitepaper on MIPI and was impressed that they offer all IPs required for implementing complete MIPI standards. Following picture shows how Arasan IPs can be used to build an entire mobile device.

Arasan’s offering includes digital and analog IP, ESL models, software, VIP, test benches, compliance test vectors and so on. Arasan acts as a companion who designs and supports all its products ensuring complete interoperability between all IPs in the system.

It supports all important standards such as UFS (Universal File System), DSI (Display Serial Interface), CSI (Camera Serial Interface), SLIMbus (Serial Low-power Inter-chip Media Bus), PHY (Physical Layer Devices, D-PHY, M-PHY), UniPro (Unified Protocol) and DigRF (Digital Radio Frequency) including their physical layers and system side DMA and bus interfaces.

A standard MIPI architecture with UniPro having all layers (L1.5 to L4) can be represented as –

The PHY and UniPro products provide bus connections and are common to different standards controllers. Sample CSI-2 system architecture is represented as –

Sample DSI-2 system architecture is below –

Arasan offers both Host and Device SLIMbus cores that are fully compliant with the SLIMbus specification.

It also provides a SLIMbus Analyzer which is a versatile tool to assist in developing and debugging SLIMbus products. The system consists of hardware and software with user friendly GUI run on a PC.

Overall, Arasan provides complete range of IPs for mobile products with latest, powerful standards and can help accelerate time-to-market for these products. It’s worth looking at their portfolio of offerings.

Details of all these products can be found in Arasan’s whitepaper here.