Automotive and More Applications
Automotive infotainment displays for navigation systems started using FPD-Link in 2001. BMW was the first car maker to use FPD-Link in their cars for transferring navigation graphics from the head unit to the central information display. Many other car manufacturers then started using FPD-Link. Today, most infotainment and driver assist applications are using FPD-Link II and FPD-Link III to benefit from the embedded clock and control signals, which will be described in the next section. One of the main benefits is the reduced cable size and weight due to the single wire pair for all the data and clock signals.
The automotive environment is known to be one of the harshest for electronic equipment due to inherent extreme temperatures and electrical transients. In order to satisfy these stringent reliability requirements, the FPD-Link II and III chipsets meet or exceed the AEC-Q100 automotive reliability standard for integrated circuits, and the ISO 10605 standard for automotive ESD applications.
There is another display interface based on FPD-Link, which is OpenLDI. (Sometimes the OpenLDI and FPD-Link terms are used interchangeably.) It enables longer cable lengths because of a built-in DC balance coding to reduce the effects of intersymbol interference. In the Open LDI version of DC balance coding, one of the seven serialized bits indicates whether the coding scheme needs to invert the other six bits transmitted in the clock period to maintain DC balance. Therefore, each LVDS pair other than the clock pair effectively transmits six bits per clock cycle. However, OpenLDI lost the video-transfer standards competition to Digital Visual Interface (DVI) in the early twenty-first century, and the result was stand-alone LCD display panels using DVI to receive video from a desktop computer.
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