Applications & Solutions

Mobile Computing & Automotive Design and Debug

Technology innovation today continues to come from mobile computing, and now also from automotive innovations such as Advanced Driver Assistance Systems and in-vehicle infotainment systems. This innovation is driving the need for higher performance, lower power, and longer battery life. MIPI® serial technologies have been developed to optimize both performance and power consumption, driving adoption by silicon chipset vendors, mobile device manufacturers and automotive applications.

MIPI M-PHY, a 12 gigabit per second (Gb/s) electrical physical layer standard, is the PHY layer for Universal Flash Storage (UFS) memory. Vendors are implementing M-PHY in mobile devices for UFS memory storage using the UniPro link layer protocol.

UFS is also the ideal memory solution for automotive applications such as in-vehicle infotainment systems due to its superior performance, high reliability and ruggedness, and cost-effectiveness.

As developers implement MIPI serial technologies, a new set of design, debug and test challenges present themselves. Developers need to equip themselves with new tools capability of testing MIPI serial buses effectively, to shorten time to market and reduce the cost of the debug phase in product development.

Compliance Testing

Compliance or conformance testing is recommended or indicated for Host-Device interoperability verification of silicon and end-products. Common applications include initial device turn-on, system integration debug, inter-op workshop preparation, and compliance or conformance certification.

Protocol Insight’s Falcon G550C/G450C Exerciser/Analyzer products perform compliance/conformance testing of UFS 4.0 and 3.1, and UniPro 2.0 and 1.8.

The Falcon series exerciser/analyzers provide complete test coverage and analysis, using the exerciser to generate the CTS test cases and the patented Trace Validation state machine tool to analyze the CTS Pass/Fail results and provide insight into failure conditions. This will result in a shorter debug cycle while requiring less knowledge of the JEDEC JESD220 or MIPI M-PHY UniPro specifications on the part of the compliance team.

The Falcon G550C and G450C offer integrated UFS and UniPro protocol exerciser and analyzer capability for MIPI M-PHY HS-G5 and HS-G4 respectively. The G550C/G450C products incorporate the UFS compliance and UniPro conformance testing capabilities of Test Executive.

Serial Protocol and MIPI Design Consulting Services

Protocol Insight offers system architecture, integration and digital logic design services and consulting for serial protocol designs.