1 Market Need

As a whole, the automotive industry is seeing a trend towards more advanced systems that assist drivers, reduce vehicular accidents, and improve passengers' overall experience. These driver assistance systems incorporate environmental sensing, as well as driver and in-cabin monitoring to create functionally safe systems. The successful implementation of these designs necessitates an increase in the number of camera modules, and a matching increase in communication channels needed for these sensors.

FPD-Link SerDes provides a method of high resolution, uncompressed data transfer enabling high-speed, high-performance video and sensor interfaces. Quad- and dual-channel FPD-Link SerDes modules are available for multi-camera applications. In some cases however, an odd number of cameras is not easily supported by these even-channeled deserializers. In these cases one method for the addition of a third or fifth camera module to a dual- or quad-camera system is with the use of multiplexing. Multiplexing FPD-Link can be used specifically for multi-camera systems where using two or more cameras in the application are mutually exclusive in use, as illustrated by Figure 1-1. Multiplexing also reduces the number of CSI-2 ports needed on the central processor, freeing up important IOs for other use cases through the vehicle. This configuration can contribute to a reduction in the cost and size of the system and overall space efficiency.

Figure 1-1 illustrates two mutually-exclusive cameras in a single ADAS system.