Collaboration seeks to accelerate promotion of USB 3.0 Standard

In December 2009, Renesas Electronics released its usb attached SCSI protocol (UASP) driver, supporting the new industry standard, mass storage protocol suitable for use on SuperSpeed USB to overcome the performance boundaries of the Bulk Only Transfer (BOT) protocol. The new UASP driver will be used with Renesas Electronics' USB 3.0 xHCI (eXtensible Host Controller Interface) host controller. Renesas Electronics is now targeting monthly production of 2million units starting April 2010 and aims to continually contribute to advancement and standardisation of USB. The company has been collaborating with AMD in a bid to accelerate the promotion of USB 3.0. Adopting Renesas' USB 3.0 xHCI host controller to its reference design, AMD implemented USB 3.0 data transfer speeds onto its motherboards. The two organizations are also partnering to achieve interoperability of Renesas' UASP driver with AMD's motherboards to provide a standardised UASP driver into the market. AMD says it enhanced the data transfer rate by around 20% compared to the conventional BOT., while minimising design cycle time. Mike Wisor, senior director of System Software Development at AMD, said: "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." The next generation interface is designed to be used in electronic devices such as PCs, PC peripherals and digital appliances. It is said to be capable of supporting data transfer rates of up to 5Gbps, which is 10 times faster than the previous USB 2.0 transfer speeds.