Next-Gen Sensor Challenges
Sensor Challenges in Next Generation Consumer Devices, IOT, and Automotive Design.
Over the last decade, we have seen an explosion of mobile phone devices along with sensors on the devices. Right from accelerometers, gyroscopes, ambient light, proximity, infrared, humidity, and temperature. These sensors are great for the consumer experience from the system integration poses a challenge. Consumers are demanding every device to be as smart as a smartphone. Hence the demand for sensor integration into consumer devices has grown exponentially. Each of these sensors requires an interrupt and hence dedicated GPIO pins are taken away from the system designer.
In case the system or 15 Sensors, 15 pins of the chip need to be dedicated to the sensors interface only. Adding to the challenge is the kind of functionality sensors manufacturers are adding to the sensors. Modern-day sensors require higher bandwidth for data transfers.
To the rescue comes I3C Protocol Analyzer. I3C Protocol Analyzer is a MIPI standard supporting inband interrupts. Its backward compatibility with I2C, SPI, and inband interrupt saves the dedicated GPIO pin for the system designer. However, as the number of sensors added to consumer device increases. The Debug of the sensor is a new challenge during the board bring-up or Firmware Debug. There is a need to not only understand which sensor interface is misbehaving it’s also required to know the sequence of the transaction.I3C also supports dynamic addressing with devices needing to enumerate and assign addresses. This increases the need for advanced debugging and analysis of the protocol. The engineers need to be equipped to handle the new complexity added new I3C MIPI standard.
If you need help with I3C Debug and I3C Protocol Analysis, Prodigy is here to help. Prodigy offers I3C Protocol Analyzer and Exerciser. Prodigy is a very active contributor to the MIPI Alliance and the MIPI Sensor Workgroup, making contributions to the specifications such as I3C, MIPI PHYs, CSI, DSI, UniPro, and more.
