Date: 20/12/2010

The electronics design interface-standard buzzwords for 2011

Each year few new standards, which have taken birth in the same year or previous years mature and suddenly start influencing the market and electronic product designs. In electronics design, the standards are not just standards but are business strategies. In 2010, few of interface (bus) standards have emerged and are expected to grow faster in 2011 and may even mature.

Few of such interface standards are USB 3.0, DisplayPort and HDMI, SATA/SAS, PCI Express, and MIPI.

Industry is accepting USB3.0 reluctantly because of its less market differentiating abilities but its going to help the end user a lot by speeding up the data interface between portable devices and host computer, so inevitably USB3.0 is happening.

DisplayPort and HDMI is clearly in the full adoption mode because of the system independent digital video interface required by both fixed and portable electronic devices such as phones, computers and TVs . This clearly gives advantage to the companies who are key investors in developing HDMI and DisplayPort, mainly the billion dollar club members of semiconductor industry.

SATA/SAS, PCI Express has already grown in 2009 and 10, in 2011 is surely a maturity year for these interfaces.
MIPI is new in mobile phone and tablet computer domain; semiconductor vendors are adopting this in exponential way in their chips.

On EE Herald all over 2011 our editorial will focus and create separate section for maturing interface standards by providing info on physical-layer, protocol-layer and interoperability testing with linked content to tutorials, application notes, white papers, electronics design blogs in the coming months.