Vintage data-transfer tech gets upgrade after 35 years
Tech artifacts like old Mac computers are finding their way to museums, but some never-say-die technologies continue to serve requirements important to computing.
Inside wearables, smart devices, robots, and computers like Raspberry Pi are communications buses called I2C (Inter Integrated Circuits), which date back to 1982, and SPI (Serial Peripheral Interface), which was born in 1979.
Those buses have driven short-range communication between circuits and microcontrollers for decades. They now serve as key interfaces for sensor-related communication on smart devices, wearables, and computers.
But as devices get equipped with more powerful, bandwidth-hungry sensors like 360-degree cameras, these out-of-date buses won't be able to keep up in the long run. So standards-setting organization MIPI Alliance wants to bury I2C and replace it with the faster and modern I3C bus and also merge SPI into the new interface.
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