Renesas Electronics has announced the release of a SuperSpeed USB (Universal Serial Bus) 3.0 SATA3 bridge SoC, the µPD720230. The SoC enables data transfer between a USB3.0 host system and a SATA device in external USB storage equipment. The SoC supports the UASP (USB attached SCSI protocol) that speeds up data throughput for large volumes of data, claims the company. This SoC can be combined with the company's host-controller technology and UASP driver software. In addition to the company's host controllers, the UASP driver operates with AMD's A70M and A75 chipsets. The key features of the SoC are 6Gbyte/s high-speed data transfer, both UASP and bias overlay topology protocols support, and data transfer performance of over 370Mbyte/s in UASP mode. The SoC is available in a 48pin QFN package, incorporates a voltage regulator, and also supports bus power modes. According to the company, the SoC reduces overall power consumption by approximately 40% when the system is in the idle state via the USB 3.0 U1 and U2 power states. The USB 3.0 is claimed to reduce the data transferring time to 10% compared with that of the USB 2.0 and automatically extends the idle time.
