Renesas Electronics intros world’s first USB 3.0-SATA3 bridge SoC supporting high-speed UASP protocol

SANTA CLARA, USA: Renesas Electronics Corp. announced the availability of its new SuperSpeed Universal Serial Bus (USB 3.0) SATA3 bridge system-on-chip ([SoC], part number µPD720230) that enables data transfer between a USB 3.0 host system and a Serial ATA (SATA) device in external USB storage equipment.

The new SoC is the world's first USB 3.0 bridge SoC that supports the UASP (USB Attached SCSI Protocol), significantly speeding up data throughput for large volumes of data.

USB 3.0 achieves data transfer speeds more than 10 times faster than the previous version of the standard, USB 2.0—currently the mainstream data transfer technology, and therefore easily supports the growing need for increased data-recording media capacities. Renesas has led the industry by releasing the µPD720200 USB 3.0 host controller in May 2009 and began mass production in June that same year. Since then, the company’s lineup of USB 3.0 host controllers has been adopted by customers worldwide.

Total shipments of these products already have exceeded 40 million units since May 2010, and Renesas has ramped up production of its USB 3.0 host controllers to 6 million units per month. During this period, the company also released in December 2009 a UASP driver that achieves high-speed data transfers for storage devices by improving the performance limit of the BOT (Bulk-Only Transfer) standard used by USB 2.0, making it possible for external storage devices to take advantage of the increased speed offered by the new USB 3.0 standard.

To respond to the need for even faster data transfer performance necessary with the increased scale of the data handled in the storage device market, Renesas has released the µPD720230 bridge SoC. This device, combined with Renesas’ advanced host-controller technology and UASP driver software, achieves industry-leading data transfer performance.

In addition to Renesas’ USB 3.0 host controllers, the UASP driver operates with AMD’s A70M and A75 chipsets, made possible through close cooperation with AMD. Renesas also plans on achieving compatibility with AMD’s future USB3-supporting chipsets.