Renesas Electronics Collaborates with AMD to Accelerate Promotion of USB 3.0 Standard

The new UASP driver will be used with Renesas Electronics' USB 3.0 xHCI (eXtensible Host Controller Interface) host controller (part number µPD720200), which entered the market as the world's first USB 3.0 host controller in June 2009. Having shipped over three million units of its µPD720200 host controller, as a dedicated promoter of USB 3.0 standard, Renesas Electronics is now targeting monthly production of two million units starting April 2010 and aims to continually contribute to advancement and standardization of USB.

To continue to drive market leadership and meet the demand for USB 3.0, Renesas Electronics has been collaborating with AMD to accelerate the promotion of USB 3.0. Adopting Renesas Electronics' USB 3.0 xHCI host controller to its reference design, AMD successfully implemented USB 3.0 data transfer speeds onto its motherboards. Renesas Electronics and AMD are also partnering to achieve interoperability of Renesas Electronics' UASP driver with AMD's motherboards to provide a standardized UASP driver into the market. AMD successfully enhanced the data transfer rate by around 20 percent compared to the conventional BOT., while minimizing design-cycle time.

We're very pleased with the performance and cost ratio of our USB 3.0 portfolio that we've been able to achieve due to our collaboration with Renesas Electronics, and how this can offer even more value to our customers, said Mike Wisor, Senior Director of System Software Development at AMD. By combining both companies' innovation and expertise, we were able to enable the USB 3.0 ecosystem for UAS support, further increasing the performance of these USB 3.0 solutions. We are pleased to share our USB 3.0 host controller and technologies with AMD to develop their USB 3.0 product portfolio by reducing time-to-market, lowering power consumption, and improving price-performance, said Kazuyoshi Yamada, senior vice president, Renesas Electronics Corporation. Starting with AMD's motherboards, AMD and Renesas Electronics will continue to work together as the industry leaders to expand the USB 3.0 marketplace offerings with the highest quality and significantly advanced data transfer speed to provide added value to our customers in consumer and portable electronics.