Those of you working on the front lines of system development know that the Covid-19 pandemic has brought on a host of global supply chain problems. As consumers we felt it first with bathroom paper products, but eventually the supply challenges rippled through to semiconductors – making it difficult for those selling systems dependent on ICs to build and ship their own products.

All categories of devices were affected, but one that seems to have been hit particularly hard is display bridging solutions. The workhorse devices in this arena often perform mundane but critical functions such as allowing a particular processor with a certain interface to effectively communicate with a particular display with a different interface. Specific examples of these interfaces include MIPI-DSI, RGB, and LVDS.

Bridging these standards can be a crucial function for designs across a wide range of applications but understandably, developers would rather not spend a lot of time worrying about this part of their systems. In fact, in many cases the “display bridging problem” had been solved long ago and mostly forgotten until supply constraints brought it back to the forefront. Now, developers have been forced to revisit the issue rather than focusing on adding new features or new functionality to make their systems more desirable in the marketplace.

Enter QuickLogic and our long-running ArcticLink® III BX family, which supports MIPI-DSI or RGB inputs as well as MIPI-DSI, LVDS, and/or RGB outputs in single bridge or dual-output configurations. This highly flexible family features ultra-low power consumption and small (4.5mm x 4.5mm) package sizes and is supported by driver source code making system integration simple and easy.

We’ve shipped over 50 million bridging devices with no plans to stop any time soon. We’ve also been able to effectively manage our inventory so that we can offer very reasonable lead times. In fact, recently several of the world’s largest consumer product suppliers have reached out to QuickLogic based on our ability to provide solutions with good availability. In fact, we received a million-dollar purchase order in December 2021 for ArcticLink® III BX display interface bridging device from a global provider of imaging products. By the way, we expect to be at or above operating cash breakeven in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2021. This is the first time in 10 years we have had such good operating cash performance.

So, if you need this type of solution and don’t want to have to wait a long time to get it, come talk to us. Let us help you to manage your display bridge supply constraint issue. It’s another way we can both work to mitigate the impact of the global pandemic.