MIPI® Alliance Drives Advancements in Mobile Device Battery Technology with Interoperability Event

PISCATAWAY, N.J., June 13, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- MIPI Alliance today announced that six companies participated in an inaugural interoperability event featuring the recently announced Battery Interface v1.0 specification. The event enabled participating companies to put their products – and the new specification – through a series of tests designed to evaluate performance in a multi-slave environment. Participating companies Infineon Technologies, Lattice Semiconductor, Nokia, Panasonic, ST-Ericsson and UNH-IOL were the first to experience the specification in a multi-vendor environment. The Battery Interface Working Group plans to hold its second event in the September – October 2012 timeframe.

Released on February 27, the Battery Interface v1.0 specification is a robust, scalable and cost efficient single-wire communication interface that improves consumer safety, battery performance, and lessens the battery's environmental impact. Mobile device users can now look for smart batteries with longer lifetime, safe, environmentally-friendly battery chemistry as well as increased safety through temperature monitoring and decreased risk of counterfeit products. Plus, members of the mobile device ecosystem – OEMs, chipset suppliers, battery slave IC suppliers and battery pack manufacturers – will benefit from a commonly accepted battery interface that saves design and manufacturing complexity, reduces chipset space and improves cost margins. For more information, go to www.mipi.org/BIF

"Interoperability events such as this are key to the successful deployment of MIPI specifications," said Joel Huloux. "Executing such an effective event is testament to the strength of the specification and the member companies that developed it."

"MIPI BIF is a big step to a more wide-spread adoption of smarter, safer and more efficient batteries for mobile devices," said Stephan Schaecher, Infineon Technologies' Marketing Director for the ORIGA™ Product Family. "We were very pleased to participate with our recently launched ORIGA2 MIPI BIF solution in the interoperability event and see our silicon interact successfully with the hosts brought to the event by our ecosystem partners. This shows that MIPI BIF is a very well defined standard, which you can never tell for sure before the first plugfest."

"The BIF interoperability event organized by the MIPI Alliance provided an open platform for BIF master and slave devices to be tested together for the first time," said Kapil Shankar, Corporate Vice President and General Manager, Consumer Business Unit at Lattice Semiconductor.  "The BIF interoperability event creates an ecosystem of co-validated BIF master and slave solutions that mobile device manufacturers can choose from.  As a supplier of low cost, low power FPGA products (such as our iCE40 family) that are well suited for mobile consumer applications, we look forward to actively participating in future BIF interoperability events organized by the MIPI Alliance."

"ST-Ericsson is delighted to see the maturity of BIF specification in the first interoperability event," said Alexandre Balmefrezol , Head of Analog System Design at ST-Ericsson. "This interoperability event really proved that BIF is a solid specification to continue building on and we were pleased to see that our BIF host interacted successfully with all slave devices brought to the event by other member companies."

The Battery Interface Working Group plans to hold a second event in the September – October timeframe to advance its basic interoperability results. "The Battery Interface specification touches all aspects of the battery ecosystem," said David Woolf, senior engineer with the University of New Hampshire – InterOperability Lab, which administered the event. "We hope to expand on our initial success with a second multi-vendor/multi-slave interoperability event."   

About MIPI Alliance

MIPI Alliance is a global, collaborative organization comprised of companies that span the mobile ecosystem and are committed to defining and promoting interface specifications for mobile devices. MIPI Specifications establish standards for hardware and software interfaces which drive new technology and enable faster deployment of new features and services. For more information, visit www.mipi.org .

MIPI® is a registered mark of MIPI Alliance, Inc.

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SOURCE MIPI Alliance