What is Unipro interface | Advantages of Unipro protocol
This page covers Unipro interface protocol basics. It mentions benefits or advantages of Unipro interface.
Introduction : MIPI Unipro is used as chip to chip interfacing protocol in mobile phones and other mobile electronic devices for high speed connections. Unipro supports network of 128 Unipro devices which include ICs, modules etc. Unipro (Unified Protocol) is a transport layer protocol.
What is Unipro protocol ?
The UNIPRO specifications with versions 1.4, 1.41, 1.6, 1.8 and 2.0 are published by MIPI Alliance. It is used with M-PHY with specifications 2.0, 3.0, 4.1 and 5.0. Uniport stack is used in wide range of applications which include UFS (Universal Flash Storage) developed by JEDEC for mass storage devices, Uniport-M (Unipro with M-PHY), Uniport-D (Unipro with D-PHY), CSI-3 (Camera Serial Interface-3) , DSI-2 (Display Serial Interface-2), GBT etc. UFS uses Unipro as link layer and M-PHY as physical layer. The Unipro or Uniport-M target devices are smartphones, digital cameras, tablets, multimedia devices etc.
Following are the features of Unipro Interface developed by MIPI Alliance.
• Supports multiple physical layers within single network similar to TCP/IP.
• Unipro v2.0 uses M-PHY HS-G5. This increases bandwidth up to 23.32 Gbps per lane and per direction.
• Payload length has been increased from 272 to 1144 in Unipro L2 layer
• Latency is decreased by up to 8 ms in V2.0 compare to Unipro v1.8 specifications.
Benefits or advantages of Unipro
Following are the benefits or advantages of Unipro:
➨It offers low power consumption due to introduction of six power modes and hibernation.
➨It is flexible in changing chip to chip lane routing based on traffic BW (Bandwidth) and latency requirements.
Number of lanes and operational speed of lanes can be scaled dynamically in Unipro.
➨It offers enhanced QoS with the help of CPort arbitration and data link layer pre-emption.
➨It along with physical layer offers high speed data communication in gigabits per second,
low pin count, smaller silicon area, data reliability and
congestion management.
➨Unipro supports various traffic classes both in real time or non real time.
➨It offers high performance and low EMI.
UniPro and similar high speed interfaces such as USB/PCIe are expensive compare to low speed interconnects such as SPI, I2C or CMOS.
➨Also refer advantages or benefits of
M-PHY Physical layer >>,
SLIMbus interface protocol >> and
SoundWire interface protocol >>.
Refer advantages and disadvantages of following interface protocols.
UART,
SPI,
I2C,
I2S,
Serial interface,
Parallel interface