On September 14 and 15, MIPI held its first developer conference. For more background, see my posts Cadence's History with MIPI and MIPI SoundWire . There were two keynotes on the first day. The first was by Linley Gwennap of the Linley Group. This covered much of the same ground as his keynote at the recent Linley Mobile and Wearables Conference, so I won't cover it again here. You can read my posts Smartphones: Linley's Annual Review and Wearables: Growing at 38% CAGR? The second keynote was by Rick Weitfeldt, who is chairman of the technical steering group of MIPI. In his day job, he works at Qualcomm. He talked about The MIPI Alliance Specifications Roadmap: the Wires for Wireless . He started with a bit of history. MIPI typically has three meetings per year, one in each of Asia, Europe, and the US. As a result they have blanketed the globe over the 13 years of its existence. The map above doesn't miss out many places that have any significance in electronics and semiconductor, except MIPI seems to have something against India. Whenever you hear anyone use the word "terminal" when they mean what anyone else calls a phone, you know that they work in the industry and probably in the standardization part of the industry. Rick presented the above picture showing "mobile terminal evolution." The grey dotted line shows the approximate wireless speeds. It is a straight line, but the scale is logarithmic, so that this is actually exponential. An interesting aside is how for a time the manufacturers strove to make phones smaller and smaller. At one point I had an Ericsson phone like the one on the right. The little fold-out flap didn't actually contain a microphone, rather it contained audio channels inside the plastic that directed your voice back in through the hinge to where the microphone actually was, thus not requiring any electrical connections to work through the moving joint. Then, once the smartphone came along, manufacturers strove to have as big a screen as they could and still have a phone that would fit in a pocket, could be used while on the go (walking, in a meeting, etc). We have probably reached the limit on screensize now, especially with phones where the screen wraps around the edge so that the screen is actually a little bit bigger than the phone itself. In the early days of MIPI, the standards came in waves associated with the phone generations. The big change that is now happening is that MIPI is now moving from pure mobile to what it calls "mobile influenced." The most significant mobile-influenced market is probably automotive. For example, almost every automotive camera uses MIPI's CSI-2 interface. For one thing, that's pretty much how cameras come these days. As Rick said, "the car is the biggest smartphone." So MIPI is changing its emphasis. It is still driven by the four big pillars: Performance—needs to be high enough for each generation of cell phones Power—as low as possible EMI—low...except for the radios, of course Pins—cost, every pin saved on an application processor saves about a cent The roadmap continues to be all about mobile, but no longer so focused on just a mobile terminal. There is an increased forcus on leveraging standards for use in the mobile-influenced markets. For example, MIPI is now addressing extended lengths for longer reach applications (you don't need a connection longer than about 6" in a phone, in a car it is more like 25 feet). Another standard that is likely to get wide use both in cell phones and elsewhere is I3C. This is a two-wire standard like its predecessor I 2 C, and I think it is clear that it will become the standard for connection of sensors, which obviously has application in many markets, most obviously IoT and some flavors of industrial and medical. Rick's conclusion: MIPI is in every smartphone and soon will be in every phone Expanding into other markets with new "terminals" such as wearables, VR, drones, and connected vehicles Optimizing specs to match these new markets with new members. Get more details on Cadence's Design IP for MIPI and Verification IP for MIPI . Previous: Signal and Power Integrity Masterclass![]()
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