Renesas collaborated with Intel to develop the I

Rami Sethi, vice president, Infrastructure Mixed Signal division at Renesas, said: “These devices empower our customers and partners to bring advanced platform management capabilities to every subsystem within the rack”.  

The switches have been designed to enhance scalability and reduce the complexity of high performance system designs by improving signal integrity and reducing capacitive loading in I³C control plane networks with multiple initiator controllers, such as CPU and baseboard management controllers to support targets across a large physical network running at full speed. The switches also support heterogeneous designs by providing I/O level shifting and protocol translation for mixed I²C/SMBus and I³C networks.

The MIPI I³C bus connects peripherals to processor or other management controllers. Its low power operation and EMI enable new system functionality, says the company, such as advanced telemetry, fault recovery, sideband security, component authentication and faster boot times.

The 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. In addition, the seamless translation between I³C and I²C devices provides compatibility for legacy devices on the control plane network.

The I³C intelligent switch family complements Renesas’ DDR5 I3C expanders, registered clock drivers (RCDs), power management ICs (PMICs), serial presence detect (SPD) hubs, temperature sensors and data buffers.

There is an I³C intelligent switch with two upstream ports and four downstream ports and another version has two upstream ports and eight downstream ports.

The switches are sampling to select customers now and are expected to be widely available in Q1 2023.