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, gyroscope, ambient light, proximity, infrared, humidity and temperature. These sensors are great for the consumer experience from the system integration it poses a challenge. Consumers are demanding every device to be as smart as smart phone. Hence the demand for sensor integration into consumer devices has grown exponentially. Each of these sensors require 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 for the sensors interface only. Adding to the challenge is kind of functionality sensors manufacturers are adding to the sensors. The modern day sensors require higher bandwidth for data transfers.
To the rescue comes I3C Protocol Analyzer. I3C Protocol Analyzer is MIPI standard supporting inband interrupts. Its backward compatibility with I2C, SPI and has 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 new challenge during the board bring up or Firmware Debug. There is 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 address. This increase the need for advanced debug and analysis of the protocol. The engineer’s needs 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 is a very active contributor in the MIPI Alliance and in the MIPI Sensor Work group, making contributions to the specifications such as I3C, MIPI PHYs, CSI, DSI, UniPro and more.
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