Renesas enhances USB3.0 focus by unveiling USB 3.0-SATA3 Bridge SoC

Renesas Electronics has said it has shipped 62 million units of USB 3.0 host controllers ICs since June 2009. 10x faster USB3.0 (compared to USB2.0) is hot due to its ability to connect to the peripherals to processor at a speed close to system bus. The missing USB3.0 feature in many devices make them weak in the gadget market. Due to the emergence of USB3.0, there is a need for bridge ICs to connect USB3.0 to other high speed interfaces. To address that trend, Renesas has launched USB 3.0 to SATA3 bridge SoC . The new µPD720231 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). Renesas 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. Key features and benefits of the new µPD720231 SoC as explained by Renesas includes: 1. Through integration, the new µPD720231 USB 3.0-SATA3 bridge SoC has reduced the number of components by 40 percent compared with the number of other commercial devices with equal functions. The µPD720231 features an embedded voltage regulator and power-on reset c...