What is "slimbus"

The Serial Low-power Inter-chip Media Bus (SLIMbus℠) is a standard interface between baseband or application processors and peripheral components in mobile terminals. It was developed within the MIPI® Alliance, founded by ARM, Nokia, STMicroelectronics and Texas Instruments. The interface supports many digital audio components simultaneously, and carries multiple digital audio data streams at differing sample rates and bit widths.

SLIMbus is implemented as a synchronous 2-wire, configurable Time Division Multiplexed (TDM) frame structure. It has supporting bus arbitration mechanisms and message structures which permit re-configuring the bus operational characteristics to system application needs at runtime. Physically, the data line (DATA) and the clock line (CLK) interconnect multiple SLIMbus components in a multi-drop bus topology. SLIMbus devices may dynamically “drop off” the bus and “reconnect” to the bus as required by using appropriate protocols outlined in the SLIMbus specification. When used in a mobile terminal or portable product, SLIMbus may replace legacy digital audio interfaces such as PCM, IS, and SSI (Synchronous Serial Interface for digital audio), as well as some instances of many digital control buses such as IC, SPI, microWire, UART, or GPIO pins on the digital audio components.