Renesas Electronics Corporation, a provider of advanced semiconductor solutions, has unveiled the industry's first I3C smart switch devices aimed at next-generation server motherboards and other infrastructure equipment.
The new chips greatly improve scalability and reliability while reducing the complexity of high-performance system designs. They enable I3C control plane networks with multiple initiator controllers, such as CPU and baseboard management controllers, to support targets across a large physical network operating at full speed, improving signal integrity and reducing capacitive load.
They also support heterogeneous designs, providing IO level switching and protocol translation for mixed I2C/SMBus and I3C networks.
The MIPI I3C bus is a scalable control bus interface for connecting peripherals to processors or other management controllers. It offers advantages of high performance, higher reliability, low power consumption and low electromagnetic interference. All of these benefits enable new system functionality such as advanced telemetry, crash recovery, sideband security, component authentication, and faster boot times.
“Renesas pioneered I3C hubs and expanders targeting the DDR5 DIMM market and we have always envisioned great potential for this technology to proliferate across the platform,” said Rami Sethi, vice president of the Mixed Signal Infrastructure Division at Renesas. . “We are excited to have worked with Intel to realize this vision with the launch of our new family of I3C intelligent switches. These devices empower our customers and partners to bring advanced platform management capabilities to every subsystem in the rack.”
Current system designs often use the legacy I2C protocol and simple field-effect transistor (FET) switches to connect initiator and target devices on a motherboard. This approach cannot scale to I3C speeds, which fundamentally limits system management to the most rudimentary capabilities.
Renesas' new family of I3C smart switches enables expansion from two initiator (upstream) ports to four, eight or more destination ports at full speed with full protocol awareness and compliance. The new products also provide seamless translation between I3C and I2C devices, enabling full plug-and-play compatibility of legacy devices in the control plane network. The I3C Intelligent switch is the result of close collaboration between the Renesas and Intel teams, starting with design, specification definition and other pre-silicon activities. The collaboration continued to publish silicon activities, including software and component development, as well as system-level validation.
“We are pleased with the strong collaboration between Renesas and Intel in defining a critical circuit solution for the expanding use cases of MIPI I3C Basic applications,” said Vik Tymchenko, vice president, GM Platform Hardware Engineering Division, GM. Intel. “Products like the I3C Smart Switch Family help address the fundamental limitations of MIPI I3C interface implementations in data center hardware. With an I3C switch we can increase the capacitance and devices supported by an I3C network.”
The new family of I3C smart switches complements Renesas solutions such as DDR5 I3C expanders, registered clock drivers (RCDs), power management ICs (PMICs), serial presence detection (SPD) hubs, temperature sensors and data buffers.