Renesas intros second-gen USB 3.0-SATA3 bridge SoC with reduced external components

JAPAN: Renesas Electronics Corp. announced the availability of its new SuperSpeed Universal Serial Bus (USB 3.0) to Serial ATA (SATA) Revision 3 bridge SoC (system on chip,part number μPD720231) that enables the reduction of the total BOM significantly.

The uPD720231 enables effective multi-gigabit per second (Gbps) data transfer between a USB 3.0 host system and a SATA device used in widely adopted external USB hard drives and solid state drives (SSD).

USB 3.0 technology delivers more than 10 times the data transfer performance of the commonly used USB 2.0 peripheral interface. As the demand for media storage capacities and data transfer speed increases, the uPD720231 offers a fundamental building block to create an improved user experience for external USB storage.

Renesas Electronics has played a leading role both in defining USB standards and in developing USB technology. Renesas has enabled the USB 3.0 market by releasing the μPD720200 USB 3.0 host controller to mass production in June 2009. Since then, the company’s lineup of USB 3.0 host controllers has been widely adopted by customers worldwide. Total shipments of these products have already exceeded 62 million units.

In December 2009, the company also released a UASP driver that further enhances the data transfer 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 in the storage device market, Renesas introduced the μPD720230 bridge SoC and confirmed USB-IF certification in 2011.

The new μPD720231 device was developed to respond to the need to reduce the number of components and to simplify printed circuit board (PCB) controller design.