The top diagram shows a typical application setup for a driver assistance camera system. The image data captured by the camera image sensor is serialized on the left hand side and transferred over to the deserializer in the Electronic Control Unit (ECU) on the right hand side. The microcontroller/processor, DSP or FPGA in the ECU, then processes the image data. In order to enable small form factor image sensors for implementation in for instance, outside mirrors, all the “intelligence” of such systems typically resides in the ECU so the image sensor needs to be configured from the ECU upon system startup. Therefore, the deserializer is taking the control data from the microcontroller and sending it to the serializer over the same two wires of interconnection. The serializer recovers the backchannel control data and passes it to the image sensor for register configuration and dynamic reconfiguration, such as adoptions of exposure time, etc... Data from the image sensor can also flow in the “forward” direction, i.e. using the same I²C interface from the sensor to the serializer. The data is then embedded within the serial video stream and reconstructed on the deserializer I²C controller interface again. Thus, TI has a true, continuous bidirectional control channel implemented in addition to the conventional video serializer/deserializer function.