camera serial interface (MIPI) (CSI)

The specifications for the Camera Serial Interface (CSI) and those for the Camera Parallel Interface( CPI) come from the MIPI Alliance. For the serial interface there are three CSI versions with CS-1, CS-2 and CS-3.

CSI-1 was the standard version of the Camera Serial Interface. This version had established itself as the interface between the digital camera and the host and was replaced by the more advanced versions CSI-2 and CSI-3. CSI-2 dates from 2005 and is based in the physical layer on D- PHY and C-PHY, which were also specified by MIPI. D-PHY has 6 pins for two or three differential clock and data signals and is compatible with CSI-1. In D-PHY version 1.2, the data rate is 2.5 Gbit/s per lane, and 10 Gbit/s with four lanes. The situation is different with C-PHY, which works with serial 3- wire lanes and achieves 17.1 Gbit/s with three lanes.

In addition, the layer model of CSI-2 knows the transport layer and the application layer. On the transport layer, the lanes are combined and on the application layer, among other things, the conversion of pixels into bytes takes place. And CSI-3 from 2012 forms the interface of the next generation and is based on UniPort-M.