Renesas Electronics has released the industry's first I3C smart switchgear for 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. It provides signal integrity and reduced capacitive loading for the I3C control plane network through multiple initiator controllers such as CPU, BMC, etc. to support the goal of running at full speed on large physical networks. They also support heterogeneous designs by providing IO level shifting and protocol translation for mixed I2C/SMBus and I3C networks.
The new family also provides seamless transition between I3C and I2C devices, allowing full plug-and-play compatibility of legacy devices with control plane networks. The shift stems from close collaboration between the Renesas and Intel teams, starting with concept, specification definition, and other pre-silicon activities. The collaboration continues with post-silicon activities, including software development, component and system-level verification.
Current system designs often use the traditional I2C protocol and simple FET switches to connect the initiator and target device on the motherboard. This approach does not scale to I3C speeds, which fundamentally limits system management to the most basic functions. The company's new line of smart switches can scale two initiator (upstream) ports to four, eight or more target ports at maximum speed with full protocol awareness and compliance.
"We are excited to work with Intel to realize this vision through the launch of our new I3C smart Switch family," said Rami Sethi, Vice President of Renesas Infrastructure Mixed Signal Division. These devices enable our customers and partners to bring advanced platform management capabilities to every subsystem in the rack." "Renesas is the I3C center and expander targeting the DDR5 DIMM market, and we have always envisioned great potential for this technology to proliferate across the platform.
Vik Tymchenko, Intel vice President and General Platform Hardware Engineering, said, "We are pleased with the strong collaboration between Renesas and Intel to define a basic circuit solution for extended use cases for MIPI I3C basic applications." "Products such as the I3C Smart Switch family help address the fundamental limitations of MIPI I3C interface implementation in data center hardware. With the I3C switch, we can increase the capacitors and devices supported by the I3C network."
