The chips vastly enhance 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 (BMC), to support targets across a large physical network running at full speed by improving signal integrity and reducing capacitive loading.
They also support heterogeneous designs by providing IO level shifting and protocol translation for mixed I2C/SMBus and I3C networks.
The MIPI I3C bus is a scalable control bus interface for connecting peripherals to processor or other management controllers and offers a number of advantages such as: high performance, improved reliability, very low power, and low electromagnetic interference (EMI).
All of these benefits enable new system functionality such as advanced telemetry, fault recovery, sideband security, component authentication and faster boot times.
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, however, cannot scale to I3C speeds, which fundamentally limits system management to the most rudimentary of capabilities.
Renesas’ new I3C intelligent switch family allows expansion of two initiator (upstream) ports to four, eight or more target ports at max speed with full protocol awareness and compliance. They also provide seamless translation between I3C and I2C devices allowing full plug and play compatibility of legacy devices onto the control plane network.
The I3C Intelligent switch is a result of close collaboration between Renesas and Intel teams. Having started with conception, specification definition and other pre silicon activities, the collaboration has continued to post silicon activities including software development and component and system level validation.
“We are pleased at the strong collaboration between Renesas and Intel in defining an essential circuit solution for the expanding use cases of MIPI I3C Basic applications,” said Vik Tymchenko, VP and GM Platform Hardware Engineering Division at Intel. “Products like the I3C intelligent switch family help solve the fundamental limitations of MIPI I3C interface implementations in data centre hardware. With an I3C switch we can increase capacitance and devices supported by an I3C network.”
