“These enhancements are designed to support the higher bandwidth requirements for zonal and other emerging architectures in next-generation vehicles,” according to the MIPI Alliance. “To aid implementation, no changes were made in the upper layers of A-PHY v2.0 so that migration from previous versions would have minimal impact. Version 2.0 is fully interoperable with A-PHY v1.1 and v1.0, and devices using all three specifications can coexist on the same network.”
PAM4 encoding support now extends up to ‘gear 5’ (in MIPI’s language, also ‘G5’) up to 16Gbit/s.
Gear 6 and gear 7 (G6 and G7) have been introduced to add PAM8 and PAM16 for 24 and 32bit/s respectively.
1.6Gbit/s up-link speed provides support for symmetrical 1Gbit/s Ethernet channels over A-PHY links for command and control of automotive peripherals.
A-PHY is intended to provide links up to 15m long and have a packet error rate of 10-19 over a vehicle’s lifetime, said MIPI, adding that it also underpins the organisation’s MASS framework for connecting cameras, sensors and displays with built-in functional safety, security and data protection.
Compliance to the A-PHY specification is supported by interoperability test events. The next is in early December.
