IN THIS ISSUE
latest news	main article	new AXIe products	join newsletter	AXIe links

From Mark Elo, Chairman, AXIe Consortium Marketing Committee:

Welcome to the September edition of the AXIe newsletter. AXIe is an emerging T&M standard that supports high performance instrumentation in terms of available power per slot, cooling and board space; and AXIe has seamless compatibility with PXI and LXI instrumentation.

It is our intent with this newsletter to educate you on the AXIe standard and its practical applications in the market.

In this issue, our first article, New AXIe-based Protocol Test Modules for MIPI D-PHY Test, describes how AXIe test solutions have expanded from computing busses to mobile computing interfaces. Our second article, AXIe Specifications Get a Facelift, explains our simplified specification numbering system.

Visit http://www.axiestandard.org for more information.

New AXIe-based Protocol Test Modules
for MIPI D-PHY Test

AXIe test solutions expand from computing busses towards mobile computing interfaces

By Jean Manuel Dassonville, Agilent Technologies

In the last three decades, the PC industry has been fueling an ecosystem of standardized high speed interconnects - PCI Express, DDR, USB, Sata ,and more - between the various building blocks of typical computer architectures. Standardized busses help reduce design costs, build flexible and scalable configurations to meet various cost and performance needs, and accelerate system integration.

The fast growing mobile computer industry is facing the same technology forces with the emergence of standard interfaces defined by industry alliances such as MIPI (Mobile Industry Processor Interface).

As within the PC industry, the chip to chip connections have undergone an architectural shift from proprietary parallel buses to serializer/deserializer (SERDES) links for several reasons. Serial links eliminate parallel-bus clock skew, reduce the number of pins and traces, and enable power savings with bus sleep modes.

Gigabit serial and packet based interfaces such as MIPI D_PHY CSI (Camera Serial Interface) and DSI (Display Serial Interface) are rapidly emerging as the next generation serial interface between chipsets and LCD display and Cameras within next generation Mobile Handsets. The ongoing evolution of these serial standards introduces multiple levels of complexity in test due to a more complex protocol stack and faster and wider multilane serial links.