Having recently introduced its FPD link III serializer-deserializer product family, NatSemi sees a host of application options for these devices. One of the dominating trends in automotive electronics currently is the proliferation of cameras for intelligent assistant system, explained Erroll Dietz, Vice President of National's High-Speed Product Division in an interview. Lane departure warning, collision avoidance, park assist system, they all make use of up to six cameras positioned at various locations at the vehicle. The latest cry is image processing systems which compute “bird's eye views” of the vehicle environments, stitched together from multiple camera data.

The trend towards higher resolution and color adds to the video data flood. A data sink for this data streams are dashboard displays. Again, the trend towards larger size, higher resolution and 24-bit colors increases the bandwidth requirements for the transport networks.

As the transport medium of choice for the high-bandwidth digital signals between cameras and processing units, Dietz said. MOST buses hardly could offer sufficient bandwidth, he claimed. Ethernet, in contrast, features enough bandwidth. Nevertheless, connectors for Ethernet would be significantly more expensive that their twisted pair counterparts. Against the background of ongoing price pressure in automotive electronics, connector prices could well be the decisive factor.

NatSemi's FPD-Link III serializer-deserializer are designed to support exactly this transport medium. According to Dietz twisted-pair lines between two FPD-Link III serdes units can bridge distances of more than 10 meters at, carrying a multi-gigabit signal. “3 GBit/s over a distance of 100m is possible”, Dietz said.

Since National Semiconductor’s transmission technology features a high-speed forward channel and a low-speed back channel, it would be possible to send video data into one direction and control data into the other one in a truly bidirectional data connection. Unlike competing solutions, NatSemi’s technology is independent of the video data; the back channel does not use the vertical blanking interval. For this reason, NatSemi’s solution has a continuous low latency bidirectional data exchange. In addition, the technology avoids EMI problems since it does not use common mode modulation, Dietz said. And no software drivers are necessary; all coding is done at the semiconductor layer.

Having already achieved TS-16949 certification, the products will also be AEC-Q100 certified by September, 2010.

The market segment relevant for the serdes products is growing rapidly. Based on IMS Research figures, Dietz expects a production of 6.1 million camera-based modules for 2010. By 2017, the production will rise to 34 million units. While currently 90 percent of these cameras are analog, sophisticated applications such as stitching and aggregating video data requires digital signals which translates into higher bandwidth needs.