Acronym · Standards & Organisations
ASA (Automotive SerDes Alliance)
The industry alliance that develops an open, royalty-bearing-free serialiser and deserialiser standard for in-vehicle camera, display and sensor links. Its ASA Motion Link specification targets asymmetric high-speed links over inexpensive automotive cabling.
- Also known as
- ASA-ML, Automotive SerDes Alliance Motion Link
- Type
- Acronym
- Domain
- Standards & Organisations, Automotive & functional safety
Notes
Created to give carmakers an alternative to proprietary SerDes families such as GMSL and FPD-Link.
Overview
ASA, the Automotive SerDes Alliance, is a non-profit industry alliance that develops a common, multi-vendor specification for the high-speed serial links that carry camera, sensor and display data around a vehicle. Its specification, ASA Motion Link, defines an asymmetric link: a fast stream in one direction, such as from a camera to a processor, and a much slower control channel back. Founded in 2019 by BMW, Continental, Broadcom, Fraunhofer IIS and NXP, it reports more than 170 member companies.
How it works
Cameras, radar and displays in a car need several gigabits per second of data over cables that can be many metres long, and such links have often relied on vendor-specific serialiser and deserialiser chip families. ASA's aim is a standard that chips from different suppliers can share, so that a carmaker can mix sensors and processors without being tied to one vendor's link.
ASA Motion Link version 1.01 defines downstream line rates from 2 to 16 Gb/s with a much lower-rate upstream path, over channels of up to 15 metres of coaxial cable or 10 metres of shielded twisted pair, with up to four in-line connectors. The physical layer uses time-division duplexing, sharing one cable between the two directions in turn, and the specification covers the physical, data link and transport layers. Security is built in: the alliance's framework covers authentication, encryption and integrity checks on the link itself. Version 2.0, released in 2024, added an Ethernet mode (ASA-MLE) that carries Ethernet packets asymmetrically at up to 10 Gb/s in one direction.
The alliance works through technical committees and holds interoperability plugfests where chips from different members are connected and tested together. Its specifications are available to members, and it has shared them with the IEEE 802.3 working group, which is developing an asymmetric automotive Ethernet standard.
Examples
- NXP's AVL1402XX, a four-port ASA Motion Link SerDes with ports configurable as serialiser or deserialiser and two MIPI CSI-2 ports, aimed at radar, front-view and surround-view cameras.
- The first ASA Motion Link interoperability plugfest, held in Munich in September 2025.
- A front camera module sending video to a central computer over a single coaxial cable using ASA Motion Link.
- ASA's liaison of Motion Link 2.0 to the IEEE P802.3dm asymmetrical automotive Ethernet task force in 2024.
Why it matters
Driver assistance cameras, radar and many in-vehicle displays need a long, robust, high-rate link, so the choice between ASA Motion Link and proprietary links affects carmakers' sourcing freedom, chip vendors' product plans and the design of vehicle computers. Automotive SoC architects, network and SerDes verification engineers, applications engineers and standards delegates work with it.
Related terms
Part of the Standards & Organisations glossary, with every term in the topic and the lifecycles, tools and standards that use them.
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Used on 9 pages of the Hub. In each group, the pages that mention it most come first.
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