In the 1990s, PCs have no doubt that is the highest cost-effective platform, and engineers in other fields realize that if they use PC components in their non-PC applications, they benefit from these low cost and high reliability components. . Many embedded designers carry forward this approach to provide greater value for end consumers. In the past few years, the PC is no longer a cost-effective platform that can be utilized. Now, smartphones and tablets have become the market dominance, while the PC market is shrinking. As the previous designer uses a low-cost PC component, today's engineers also want to use components developed for smartphones and tablets to achieve the same good results.
The bus and interface used by the vast majority of smartphones and tablets on the market are defined by the Mobile Industry Processor Interface (MIPI) Alliance. Founded in 2003, the MIPI Alliance has been promoted by setting technical specifications for various mobile system peripherals such as image sensors, memory, display, RF components, and other mobile platforms and software interfaces between application processors. Development of interconnection between components. Figure 2 shows a typical mobile platform MIPI standard interface.
Display, camera and application processors may be that embedded system designers can benefit most of the MIPI standard components from the mobile market. As shown in Figure 2, mobile system design now often includes an LCD display using a display serial interface (DSI) and a camera image sensor using the camera serial interface (CSI-2). The main challenge of embedded system designers is how to build a bridge between the mature interfaces commonly used in embedded applications and the interface between the MIPI Alliance defined in the mobile system to take advantage of these costs of mobile application elements.
Most smartphones and tablets use the bus and interface defined by the MIPI standard organization. For example, the display display interface is referred to as DSI (display serial interface), and the image sensing interface is called CSI-2 (camera serial interface). MIPI Standards Organization Defines the interconnection of application processors and numerous peripherals, including image sensors, memory, display, RF elements, and sensors, and the like. Some embedded designers even want to apply the processor as the core of their build system. Unfortunately a lot of such a design cannot be achieved, because existing software and features are developed for several generations of embedded processors, implementing these designs To undertake high cost. However, there are still some designs or other components in smartphones and tablets. The most important challenge for achieving these design is to connect, need to connect the interface bridge of the mature application to a large number of MIPI standard bus, such as DSI.
In order to better illustrate, let us imagine a microcontroller that conducts a lot of software development and capital investment. Suppose this system designer wants to continue to use this microcontroller while expecting the display in the mobile device. The DSI interface for the display is a serial SLVS signal bus. The problem is that the microcontroller uses a CMOSRGB or LVDSFlatLink bus to connect to the LCD display. This is not compatible with the DSI interface, so these two devices cannot work properly.
Previously, the designer could only abandon the idea of using a low cost DSI display in embedded design unless the cost of the ASIC used for bridging is reasonable. This is not an example, and the designer has to use an expensive display in a large number of mainstream design. Fortunately, there is now a low cost, and the solution that is easy to configure can solve this problem. In fact, these solutions allow almost all embedded designs to use low-cost DSI display.
A new set of solutions recently released by Latti uses ultra-low density (ULD) FPGA bridge MipidSI and CSI-2 interfaces to a large number of traditional bus. These low-cost, low-power FPGA products and MIPI reference design are designed to build an ideal bridge chip that connects the DSI display to a variety of embedded microprocessors or microcontrollers.
For example, we assume that the microcontroller wants to use with the CMOSRGB888 (24-bit color bus) display interface. The first step needs to confirm how to program the configuration of the DSI display. Most of the cases the microcontroller configured via the I2C bus. However, DSI cannot accept I2C to configure the display. The DSI receives the display command setting (DCS) by serial data channel D0. Thus, the FPGA needs to convert the I2C instructions emitted by the microcontroller into a series of DCS instructions to configure the DSI display. Once the programming of the display is completed, the FPGA is configured to receive the data of the RGB888 interface. Suppose the resolution of the RGB888 bus output is the same as the resolution of the DSI display. Next, the parallel bus needs to be converted into a serial DSI bus. If the resolution of the microcontroller output is different from the resolution of the display, the FPGA can scalable the image. In both cases, you must configure the number of data output channels of the DSI interface. After the configuration is complete, ULDFPGA will output a DSI transmit interface to drive the DSI display.
How do you implement when the interconnection requirements of the application processor and the non-DSI standard LCD display? Although there are some application processors to have more than one display interface bus, most of them use only DSI standards. So the similar challenges discussed in the previous section appeared again. You need to apply the processor to output its DSI signal to the LCD display, similar to the LVDSFLATLINK bus. The same ULDFPGA can also be used as such bridged solutions. In this type of design, the DSI will use the input bus of the FPGA, the LVDS display is driven by the FPGA.
Now designers can use low-cost ULDFPGA devices to DSI and CSI-2 interfaces, so that the components in a large number of mobile devices can achieve unique design. As the PC era is used to assist embedded design to reduce costs, the ULDFPGA device and DSI and CSI-2 solutions have been promoted by the CSI-2 solution, and designers can also benefit from the use of various mobile device components with the help of the ULDFPGA devices and DSI-2 solutions. For example, a display screen, an application processor, and an image sensor.
Original link: https://www.eeboard.com/news/fpga-23/
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