The automotive industry is undergoing significant transformation. To provide users with a better experience, developers are increasingly demanding higher requirements for depth, frame rate, camera, display resolution, and most importantly, functional safety. To address these challenges and support future automotive architectures, the MIPI Alliance has developed an end-to-end framework──MIPI Automotive SerDes Solutions (MASS), which links sensors, cameras, displays, and various industry standard protocols with functional safety and software safety.
Synopsys’s Verification IP (VIP) can be used for MIPI, providing a comprehensive solution that includes methodologies, verification, and productivity enhancements. This article will introduce the features and details of MIPI CSE™ (Camera Service Extension, one of the key components of the MASS connection framework) and how Synopsys’s VIP solutions will support this protocol.
What is MIPI CSE?
Before the release of MASS, the automotive industry had to rely on SerDes protocols or provide their own functional safety solutions for remote communication between peripheral components and CPUs. This was largely due to the lack of standards and support for network architecture, with limited choices available to vendors, economies of scale being restricted, and increasing complexity and costs of design.
MASS covers a set of widely adopted protocols that have been used in high-level applications across billions of devices, now entering the automotive industry. The MIPI CSE protocol is part of the MASS suite, extending the capabilities of the MIPI CSI-2® (Camera Serial Interface 2) protocol to support functional safety, enabling MASS-based applications to meet the functional safety requirements of ISO 26262 standards.
Combining MIPI CSI-2 and MIPI CSE
MIPI camera interfaces, sensors, and application processors can communicate with each other, providing advanced imaging capabilities, high-resolution images, and rich colors for automobiles, drones, smartphones, tablets, and other devices. MIPI CSI-2 is the most widely adopted protocol for high-speed cameras and imaging interfaces, and the introduction of MIPI CSE undoubtedly further improves this protocol for automotive applications, adding several extended features such as functional safety and software safety, as shown in the figure below.
▲Figure 2: MIPI CSE Architecture
By standardizing processes and simplifying workflows, the MIPI CSE protocol helps integrate high-performance image sensors into the next generation of vehicles and IoT devices. Additionally, MIPI CSE adds new functionalities for MIPI CSI-2 for next-generation image sensor applications, as listed below.
Achieving Functional Safety with MIPI CSE
The functional safety achieved by MIPI CSE utilizes three main functions for image data transmission:
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Circular Redundancy Check (CRC-32) -
Frame Counter -
Message Counter
▲Figure 3: Functional Safety Features of MIPI CSE
MIPI CSE includes two types of protocols to ensure the functional safety of image and control data:
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CSE_i (Image Data Transmission) – In CSE_i, the SEP (Service Extension Package) format provides an end-to-end data protection mechanism from the sensor to the associated ECU. SEP supports full E2E protection from source to destination, regardless of whether the PHY device is A-PHY, C-PHY, or D-PHY.
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CSE_c (Control Data Transmission) – In CSE_c, the control channel between the sensor and the associated ECU will be protected end-to-end by the ESS-CCI (Enhanced Camera Command Interface Information Security and Software Safety) protocol.
SEP packets are created by the source node and sent to the destination node, and may be modified or compromised between the source and destination; if all components in the system (i.e., source and destination) support MIPI CSE, this situation can be detected.
Conclusion
Automotive technology is evolving at an unprecedented pace, and the role of electronic components in the design and successful operation of new vehicles has never been more critical than today. With MIPI Automotive SerDes Solutions (which includes MIPI CSI-2 and MIPI CSE), automotive manufacturers can integrate various emerging safety measures, such as low-latency rear-view imaging, sign detection sensors, and 360-degree panoramic cameras. Besides automotive applications, MIPI CSE functionalities are also suitable for other safety-critical applications.
Synopsys’s VIP for MIPI CSI-2 is natively integrated with Synopsys’s Verdi® protocol analyzer debugging solution and Verdi® performance analyzer. Synopsys VIP can dynamically switch speed configurations at runtime and offers a comprehensive and customizable set of frame generation and error injection capabilities.
Running system-level payloads on SoCs requires faster, hardware-based pre-silicon solutions. Synopsys’s transaction processors, memory models, mixed and virtual solutions based on Synopsys IP can achieve various verification and validation use cases on the industry’s fastest verification hardware, Synopsys ZeBu® hardware acceleration solutions, and Synopsys HAPS® prototyping systems.
Synopsys has been a pioneer in supporting the latest MIPI protocols.
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