Shielded MIPI cables for high data rates

4th November 2019

Alex Lynn

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Vision Components supplies its MIPI camera modules with a shielded FPC (flexible printed circuit) cable, which is primarily designed for the MIPI modules and enables high data transfer rates. The company uses the stalwart MIPI CSI-2 camera interface and the Raspberry Pi connector schema.

Raspi boards are the most widely used single-board computers, and several other manufacturers have already adopted the same pinout. Until a standard is formulated, this choice ensures the widest possible suitability of the VC MIPI modules.

The camera boards manufactured by VC in Germany can be connected to various popular CPU boards. This allows developers to quickly test image processing concepts and easily and cost-effectively configure embedded vision systems.

VC MIPI camera boards with 22-pin sockets can be connected with 15-pin and 22-pin MIPI interfaces via cables with two or four transmission lanes. Thanks to this configuration, the high speeds of the MIPI CSI-2 standard can be fully utilised. Most processors can handle 1.5Gbps per lane; that makes 6Gbps for four lanes and 600 MByte/s at 10-bit pixel resolution, twice as fast as USB3 cameras.

The cables newly developed by Vision Components are high-tech components designed as flexible printed circuit boards with a fully shielded backside and 100-Ω differential line pairs. They ensure noise-free MIPI transmission. Vision Components has defined two pins as trigger input and flash output without compromising the function of the host systems.

In addition to video streams, the trigger input also allows single image acquisition. All settings can be adjusted for each individual image: exposure time, gain, image size and position, and binning. Thus, very fast applications can be captured and synchronised.