Scope and Applicability
UniPro and its underlying physical layer were designed to support low power operation needed for battery-operated systems. These features range from power-efficient high-speed operation to added low-power modes during idle or low bandwidth periods on the network. Actual power behavior is, however, highly dependent on system design choices and interface implementation.
The UniPro protocol can support a wide range of applications and associated traffic types. Example chip-to-chip interfaces encountered in mobile systems:
- Processor trace: 4 Gbit/s
- Mass storage file transfer : 3 Gbit/s
- 12M pixel camera @30fps : 4.5Gbit/s
- HD display 1080p@60fps : 3 Gbit/s
Note that such applications require an application protocol layer on top of UniPro to define the structure and semantics of the byte streams transported by UniPro. These can be done by simply porting existing data formats (e.g. tracing, pixel streams, IP packets), introducing new proprietary formats (e.g. chip-specific software drivers) or defining new industry standards (e.g. UFS for memory-like transactions).
Applications which are currently believed to be less suitable for UniPro are:
- low-bandwidth control - unless multiplexed with other traffic (concern: UniPro complexity is much higher than e.g. I2C)
- high-quality audio samples (concerns: UniPro does not distribute a shared clock to all devices; UniPro complexity compared to e.g. SLIMbus or I2S)
- interfaces to dynamic memory (concern: latency for processor instruction/data fetch)
Read more about this topic: Uni Pro
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