Renesas claims a first with MIPI I3C intelligent switch range
1 June 2022 
Renesas collaborated with Intel to develop the I3C intelligent switch. Vik Tymchenko, vice president and general manager of Intel’s Platform Hardware Engineering division, said: “Products like the I3C intelligent switch family help solve the fundamental limitations of MIPI I3C interface implementations in data centre hardware”. The switch can increase capacitance and devices supported by an I3C network.
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.