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Splitting a FPD-Link III signal

Hello,

My question is about if it is possible to split a FPD-Link III so that one video sender simultaneously can feed two video receivers. One of the receivers, called the image processing unit below, is the master of the bidirectional I2C control channel and also power provider to the sender called camera unit below. The second receiver should be able to receive video and be a slave on the I2C control channel. The splitter is preferably as "stupid" as it can be, i.e. the less computational power required for performing the split the better it is. I will not be able to output two FPD-Link III signals from the Camera unit.

Below is a figure showing, on a high level, what I want to achieve:

  • Is it possible to split a FPD-Link III like I want to or is it strictly a one receiver-one sender protocol?
  • If splitting is possible, is it possible to perform the split in the serial FPD-Link III domain using for example the TI DS25MB100 circuit? If possible I would like to avoid de-serializing the link, then perform the split and then serializing the data of the two split signals back to FPD-Link III again?

  • Mattias
    In order to accomplish this, we provided the DS90UB954 deserializer with the ability to support a replica mode - where the output of the '954 is comprised of two, two lane CSI interfaces - in this way you could have one DS90UB954 sending outputs to two separate Image processing units. If the two image processing units were not close to one another, the replica CSI output could be fed to a second DS90UB953, which would provide a link to the second image processing unit which would be able to recover the FPD-III signal with a second DS90UB954.
  • Thank you Mark,

    The replica output on the deserializer combined with a serializer will definitely work for me for distributing the video signal.

    An additional question regarding the I2C control channel from the same figure. Say that I have one of the image processing units as an I2C master. Is it possible to use the ...953 and ...954 serializers/deserializers in the splitter setup you described to set up an I2C network where the camera unit is one I2C slave and the second image processing unit as a second I2C slave? I.e. a, over FPD-Link III, distributed I2C network where the master and the slaves aren't on the same PCB.
  • Yes, you would be able to have the I2C network span across all of the pieces of the system.