Renesas today announced its collaboration with AMD to promote the new SuperSpeed Universal Serial Bus (USB 3.0) standard. In December 2009, Renesas Electronics (formerly NEC Electronics Corporation) released its USB Attached SCSI Protocol (UASP) driver, supporting the new industry-standard, efficient 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 (part number μPD720200), which entered the market as the world's first USB 3.0 host controller in June 2009. Having shipped over three million units of its μPD720200 host controller, as a dedicated promoter of USB 3.0 standard, Renesas Electronics is now targeting monthly production of two million units starting April 2010 and aims to continually contribute to advancement and standardization of USB.

To continue to drive market leadership and meet the demand for USB 3.0, Renesas Electronics has been collaborating with AMD to accelerate the promotion of USB 3.0. Adopting Renesas Electronics' USB 3.0 xHCI host controller to its reference design, AMD successfully implemented USB 3.0 data transfer speeds onto its motherboards. Renesas Electronics and AMD are also partnering to achieve interoperability of Renesas Electronics' UASP driver with AMD's motherboards to provide a standardized UASP driver into the market. AMD successfully enhanced the data transfer rate by around 20 percent compared to the conventional BOT., while minimizing design-cycle time.

The USB 3.0 standard is a next-generation interface to be used in a wide range of electronic devices including PCs, PC peripherals and digital appliances, and is capable of supporting data transfer rates of up to 5 gigabits per second (Gbps), which is 10 times faster than the previous USB 2.0 transfer speeds.