Hopefully our readers have had a chance to digest everything so far on the ArcticLink III VX.  We’re going to do our best to continue to bring you information as we approach the end of the year.

Today’s subject is interfaces, and why we chose what we chose.

According to our internal market research and research we commissioned through third parties, RGB, MIPI, and LVDS will make up the predominate shares of smartphone and tablets for the next few years.

Smartphones

Without going into the gory details, we believe that MIPI will become more dominant in smartphones as both a processor and display interface, but RGB will continue to maintain a double-digit share percentage, especially in unique resolutions and new designs.

Tablets

For tablets, LVDS will definitely be the primary display interface, as panel makers are very accustomed (from the notebook world) to making larger sized, larger resolution panels with LVDS.  Tablet processors…well, that’s the big question…will there even be tablet-specific processors, or will processor makers simply adapt their smartphone units to larger displays?  Our belief is that MIPI and RGB will maintain dominant shares, with LVDS attaining share in only particular OEMs.

Pico Projectors

RGB, RGB, RGB.

So, after seeing this, it became obvious to us that there was a need for high resolution designs incorporating MIPI, RGB, and LVDS.  With the product chart we showed last time:

You can see we’ve addressed the bridging market, the MIPI pass-through market, and the dual output market (more on this in a few short days).

Some obvious questions here:

(Q) You don’t have a RGB -> RGB option.  Why not?

(A) Our ALII VX2 supports this interface, and we will continue to actively market and sell this product.

(Q) You don’t have an LVDS -> LVDS option.  Why not?

(A) First, we don’t believe that there will be a ton of systems with this architecture.  Secondly, the power consumption of the LVDS interface is substantial – in some cases, its 5X MIPI.  If you consider that we’d need to have 2 LVDS interfaces (input and output) on an LVDS -> LVDS chip, power consumption would be so high that it would likely offset the majority of the power savings benefits of DPO HD+.

(Q) What’s the value of a MIPI -> MIPI chip?

(A) The viewability benefits of VEE HD+ and power savings benefits of DPO HD+

(Q) Why a dual output chip?

(A) As a very good sales guy once told me… “keep tuned” …