Displaying posts in the categoryInterfaces and Protocols
Interfaces and Protocols articles
Photonics
For the last two years the hardest thing to get in AI hardware was not the chip itself but the package around it. TSMC's CoWoS capacity has decided how many accelerators can ship. Now TSMC is reported to be weighing another price rise for that packaging, and on 2 November 2026 Marvell agreed to buy Lumentum for about $115 billion to get into optical interconnect. Together they show where the bottleneck is moving: from packaging to the links…
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Murugavel Ganesan
November 03, 2026
Tutorials
An optical power meter measures how much light arrives at a point in a fibre link, using a photodiode that turns optical power into an electrical current, and shows the result in watts or dBm. Paired with a stable light source it also measures optical loss in dB, which is how installers prove a link is within its budget. Accurate results depend on setting the right wavelength, using clean connectors, choosing the correct reference method and usi…
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The Editor's Desk
October 26, 2026
Video
Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) is a set of IEEE 802.1 standards that make standard Ethernet deterministic. It gives every device a shared sense of time, schedules time-critical traffic into reserved windows, lets urgent frames interrupt long ones, and can send critical streams over two paths at once. The result is bounded latency, low jitter and high reliability, so control traffic and ordinary data can share one network in cars, factories and …
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Murugavel Ganesan
February 17, 2026
SerDes
Disclaimer: this article is for information and education only . It reflects publicly available data, industry trends and professional analysis as of the publication date (August 2025). Every effort has been made to be accurate, but no guarantee is given that it is complete, correct or still current . The report includes interpretations, forecasts and opinions based on public information from vendors, consortia and research sources. They are n…
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Murugavel Ganesan
August 08, 2025
SerDes
OpenGMSL is an effort to turn Analog Devices' Gigabit Multimedia Serial Link (GMSL), a proprietary automotive SerDes used since 2008 to carry camera, display and sensor data over coax or shielded twisted pair, into an open, multi-vendor standard. The OpenGMSL Association, a non-profit consortium, was announced in June 2025 to publish the GMSL2 and GMSL3 based specification, license its essential patents on open terms and run mandatory compli…
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Murugavel Ganesan
August 01, 2025
Interfaces and Protocols
A zonal ECU (Electronic Control Unit) is a controller that looks after every electrical function in one physical zone of a vehicle, such as the front left corner, the rear or the cabin, whatever domain those functions belong to. Instead of one ECU for the engine, another for lighting and another for body comfort, a zonal ECU gathers the sensors, actuators and loads in its area, connects them to a central computer over a high-speed backbone such …
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Murugavel Ganesan
June 16, 2025
SerDes
Image courtesy: MIPI Alliance/Various LiDAR and RADAR can use the MIPI Camera Serial Interface 2 (CSI-2) because CSI-2 is, at heart, a packet protocol with generic and user-defined data types, not only a pixel pipe. The sensor's front end or controller packs its samples, detections or point cloud into CSI-2 long packets, sends them over a D-PHY or C-PHY link (or over a SerDes such as MIPI A-PHY when the sensor is metres away from the pro…
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Murugavel Ganesan
June 11, 2025
