Two Clarifications on the World's Only C-PHY-Capable FPGA

Last week, based on the Gowin Arora-V GW5AT-60 FPGA, we published an article: The World's Only FPGA with MIPI C-PHY Is Here

The article mainly introduced the development of MIPI C/D-PHY and FPGA selection solutions, analyzed Gowin FPGA's breakthrough in MIPI C-PHY solutions, as well as the release of the OVERSYS development board based on the Gowin GW5AT-60 FPGA, and provided an FPGA solution for the C-PHY Sensor (IMX586):

https://item.taobao.com/item.htm?ft=t&id=856828199072

Here I stated that the Gowin GW5AT-60 is the world's only FPGA supporting MIPI C-PHY, and in fact quite a few people still have doubts about this.

I'd like to thank the industry peers who offered their insights in the comments section, pointing out that the Gowin GW5AT-60 FPGA is not the only FPGA with MIPI C-PHY. Let me briefly clarify how to interpret this "only":

First, there is the Xilinx Versal Prime VM2152.

The VM2152 is claimed to be Xilinx's first FPGA supporting MIPI C-PHY, with speeds reaching 10 Gb/s. However, this C-PHY is implemented through high-speed transceivers and related control logic circuitry, not a true MIPI C-PHY hard core. Moreover, it is very expensive, and the device itself is designed for AI FPGA applications.

So when I said it's too expensive and unaffordable, I was right! And MIPI C-PHY is not a hard IP.

Second, there is the domestic Jingwei Qili HME-H3C08.

It is also a 22nm process FPGA and also supports MIPI C-PHY, which was quite unexpected to me—I indeed had not noticed it before. But after looking at the architecture diagram, it became clear to me: this is more like a SoC with a small FPGA embedded in it.

Therefore, I believe the HME-H3C08 is a customized FPGA targeting special application industries, such as DSC compression/decompression for DSI screens. Its LUT count is only 5K, clearly designed to reduce costs and maximally satisfy certain applications.

For our FPGA image processing, ISP, and similar tasks, 5K LUTs is far from sufficient. The FPGA doesn't even support DDR3/4 memory, which makes it unsuitable for our MIPI C-PHY FPGA solution development.

In summary, I still believe that the Gowin Arora-V GW5AT-60 FPGA remains the world's only FPGA with MIPI C-PHY!

In the next article, I will begin detailing our image solutions designed based on this FPGA, including MIPI C/D-PHY, MIPI DSI, DP, HDMI, DDR3, and more.

As shown in the figure, we provide all image solutions based on the GW5AT-60 FPGA, helping customers get up to speed quickly and filling market and industry gaps!