Advantages of I3C interface | disadvantages of I3C Protocol

This page covers advantages and disadvantages of I3C interface protocol. It mentions benefits or advantages of I3C interface bus and drawbacks or disadvantages of I3C protocol.

What is I3C interface bus?

I3C specification v1.0 was initially released in Oct. 2018 by MIPI Alliance, Inc. The specifications have been updated in July 2021. I3C stands for Improved Inter Integrated Circuit. It is a 2 wire interface similar to I2C. It offers more benefits compare to I2C, SPI and UART interfaces. It offers fast, low cost, low power digital interface.

I3C interface is backward compatible with I2C and offers improvements to it. It uses less energy for data/control signal transportations with reduced physical pins. The specification defines multi drop interface between host processors and peripheral devices such as sensors.

Following are the features of I3C interface.
• Data rate up to 33.3 Mbps (Max.) at 12.5 MHz using push pull configuration
• Coexists with legacy I2C devices on same bus, supports legacy I2C messaging and static addressing used by I2C devices
• Dynamic addressing
• In-Band interrupt
• Multi master/Multi-drop
• Hot join support
• In-band command codes

Benefits or advantages of I3C interface bus

Following are the benefits or advantages of I3C interface protocol:
➨It is backward compatible with I2C and hence I2C devices can also be interfaced with I3C controller.
➨It offers upgrade to existing I2C and SPI interfaces with higher performance and low power consumption.
➨Address configuration via hardware is not required as all the devices get their specific address using dynamic address assignment technique. It supports static addressing for I2C devices and data rate messaging like I2C standard.
➨As it uses in-band interrupt over same communication bus, extra pin is not required.
➨It requires only 2 signal lines compare to 4 lines required by SPI.
➨It avoids collisions due to its multi drop capability and dynamic addressing technique.
➨Master ownership and handover procedure is clearly defined in the standard.
➨It supports in-band integrated commands.
➨It offers higher effective data rate (~ 33.3 Mbps at 12.5 MHz) compare to I2C interface (~ 3 Mbps at 3.4 MHz).
➨It supports "hot joining" and hence I3C slaves can join even after the I3C bus has been configured.

Drawbacks or disadvantages of I3C protocol

Following are the drawbacks or disadvantages of I3C interface protocol:
➨It offers lower effective data rate compare to SPI interface (~ approx. 60 Mbps at 60 MHz)
➨It supports only 7 bits for device addressing.
➨It is a new standard and hence it will take some time for its wide adoption across the new devices.

➨Also refer Advantages and disadvantages of I2C interface, I2C versus I2S and difference between I2C vs SPI vs UART.

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