History and Aims
The initiative to develop the UniPro standard came forth out of a pair of research projects at respectively Nokia Research Center and Philips Research. Both teams independently arrived at the conclusion that the complexity of mobile systems could be reduced by splitting the system design into well-defined functional modules interconnected by a network. The key assumptions here were thus that the networking paradigm gave modules well-structured, layered interfaces and that it was time to improve the system architecture of mobile systems to make their hardware- and software design more modular. In other words, the goals were to counteract the rising development costs, development risks and time-to-market impact of increasingly complex system integration.
In 2004, both companies jointly founded what is now MIPI's UniPro Working Group. Such multi-company collaboration was considered essential to achieve interoperability between components from different component vendors and to achieve the necessary scale to drive the new technology.
The name of both the working group and the standard, UniPro, reflects the need to support a wide range of modules and wide range of data traffic using a single protocol stack. Although other connectivity technologies (SPI, PCI, USB) exist which also support a wide range of applications, it should be noted that the inter-chip interfaces in the mobile device industry are still generally proprietary and very diverse. This situation thus differs significantly from the (in this respect more mature) computer industry.
The final draft of Version 1.1 of the UniPro specification was completed in July 2009. Its acknowledgements list 42 engineers from 15 companies and organizations: Arasan, Broadcom, Freescale, IEEE-ISTO, Infineon, Motorola, Nokia, NXP, Qualcomm, Research in Motion, ST-Ericsson, St. Petersburg University, Testronic Laboratories, Texas Instruments, and Toshiba. In January 2011, UniPro Version 1.40 was completed. Its main purpose is full support for a new Physical Layer: M-PHY® including support for power modes change and peer device configuration. In July 2012 UniPro v1.40 has been upgraded to UniPro v1.41 to support the newer higher speed M-PHY v2.0. The UniPro v1.4x specifications have been released together with a formal specification model (SDL).
To date, several vendors have announced the availability of UniPro IP blocks and various chip suppliers have created implementations that are at various phases of development. In the meantime, the MIPI UniPro Working Wroup is setting up a conformance test suite and is preparing future extensions of the technology (see UniPro Versions and Roadmap).
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