Sharmion Kerley, MIPI Director of Marketing and Membership
Implementers of MIPI I3C®/I3C Basic™ and I3C HCI™ recently had the opportunity to engage in interoperability testing between controller and target devices at a two-day MIPI I3C Plugfest, held in conjunction with MIPI’s 69th member meeting in Warsaw. Fourteen I3C implementers from nine member and nonmember companies participated in initial to advanced interoperability testing during the event.
With representation across multiple industry segments, the plugfest allowed participants to test interoperability between an equal number of multi-vendor controller and target devices. Binho LLC, Chip Interfaces ApS, DCD-SEMI sp. z o.o., Prodigy Technovations Pvt. Ltd., Renesas Electronics Corporation, Robert Bosch GmbH, Soliton Technologies Private Limited, STMicroelectronics and Synopsys, Inc. were among the companies involved in the plugfest.
These events highlight the growing importance and breadth of applications for the I3C family of specifications and the growing number of devices, tools and software drivers in the ecosystem.
Specifications Tested
The following specifications were tested during the event:
- MIPI I3C is a scalable, two-wire utility and control bus interface for connecting peripherals to an application processor, giving developers unprecedented opportunities to craft innovative designs for an array of products—smartphones, personal computers, wearables, IoT devices, systems in automobiles and other devices. Designed as the successor to I2C, I3C incorporates key attributes of the traditional I2C and SPI interfaces to provide a high-performance, very-low-power solution with backward compatibility and a robust, flexible upgrade path. For additional flexibility, I2C devices can also co-exist with I3C devices on the same bus. MIPI I3C is available to MIPI members.
- The publicly available MIPI I3C Basic is a subset of I3C that bundles the most commonly needed I3C features for developers and other standards organizations that is licensed on royalty-free terms. MIPI I3C Basic has been adopted by PCI-SIG and NVM Express as a system management bus (SMBus), by JEDEC in its sideband bus and DDR5 standard, by ETSI in its Smart Secure Platform (SSP) and Universal Integrated Circuit Card (UICC), and is an area of focus for a MIPI liaison relationship with DMTF (Distributed Management Task Force).
- The MIPI I3C Host Controller Interface (MIPI I3C HCI) specification defines an interface that operating systems use to access MIPI I3C devices and capabilities. It delivers crucially needed efficiency for designers of smartphones, computers, Internet of Things (IoT) devices and other applications that leverage I3C and I3C Basic.
- MIPI Debug Over I3C™ is a bare-metal interface that allows system designers to debug and test application processors, power management integrated circuits, modems and other power-managed components across a system via the I3C interface.
Public versions of MIPI I3C Basic, MIPI I3C HCI, MIPI Debug Over I3C and a conformance test suite are available to download and use by developers and the open-source community. Updated FAQs and application notes that correspond with I3C/I3C Basic v1.2 will be soon available to download on the I3C webpage.
"Participating in the Warsaw I3C Plugfest was an invaluable experience. It provided a fantastic platform to collaborate and test interoperability with other leading companies in the I3C ecosystem. We are proud to say that we successfully validated our I3C Multilane and I3C HDR-BT features," noted participant Brijesh Chandrala of Prodigy Technovations.
"Warsaw marked our fourth consecutive year participating in MIPI I3C Plugfests," said Martin Cavallo of Binho LLC. "These events are essential for interoperability testing and tracking market adoption. We were pleased to help new adopters verify and refine their implementations—further strengthening the I3C ecosystem. We also confirmed that our latest protocol analyzer update, supporting the newly adopted MIPI I3C v1.2 specification, is now ready for customer use."
Future MIPI I3C Plugfest events will be announced in member communications and on the Upcoming Events page on the MIPI website.