MIPI Alliance defines several serial PHYs for use in mobile and mobile influenced environments, such as smartphone, automotive, augmented and virtual reality, as well as IoT. MIPI C-PHY and D-PHY busses are primarily used with camera and display implementations, while M-PHY is used with storage applications. MIPI Alliance also defines multiple interfaces and transport layers such as Camera Serial Interface (CSI-2), Display Serial Interface (DSI and DSI-2); and UniPro as a transport layer for M-PHY.
The MIPI C-PHY and D-PHY busses are both used in camera and display implementations. Each bus has a different use case to allow design engineers flexibility regarding performance, power and cost. Both PHYs can be applied for many use cases, such as smartphones, automotive camera sensing systems, collision avoidance radars, in-car infotainment and dashboard displays.
MIPI C-PHYSM provides high throughput performance over bandwidth-limited channels to connect displays and cameras to an application processor. C-PHY enables designers to scale their implementations to support a wide range of high resolution image sensors and displays while keeping power consumption low. It can also be used to connect low-cost, low-resolution image sensors, sensors offering up to 60 megapixels, as well as display panels offering 4K and higher resolution.
C-PHY is an embedded clock link that provides extreme flexibility and low latency transitions between high speed and low power modes. To do this, C-PHY introduces three-phase symbol encoding to transmit data symbols on three-wire lanes, or “trios”, where each trio includes an embedded clock.