Renesas Electronics introduces new I3C bus extensions

     Renesas Electronics announced the launch of four new I3C Basic bus extensions for control plane design in a variety of applications, including data centers and servers, as well as enterprise, factory automation and communications equipment. New products include the IMX3102 2:1 bus multiplexer, the IMX3112 1:2 bus expander, and the IXP3114, IXP3104 1:4 universal IO expander, which supports up to 12.5MHz and integrated thermal sensor capabilities.

     These new products provide engineers with maximum design flexibility to implement the I3C Basic system bus in applications where there may be multiple master devices, a large number of endpoint devices, and very long tracks that affect bus complexity and signal integrity. Integrated thermal sensors enable better integration of thermal management into the bus design and reduce the number of dedicated thermal sensor endpoints.

     Following the adoption of I3C Basic as DDR5 memory sideband by the JEDEC standard, the next generation of computing architecture management architectures is transitioning to I3C and pushing it to become the system management bus of choice. Distributed power management, telemetry and sub-channel level thermal management increase the complexity of the storage subsystem and therefore require higher sideband bus bandwidth.

     In addition, new demands for advanced thermal control loops, security, component authentication, and greater fault tolerance and recovery are driving similar demands for high-bandwidth interfaces across the server control plane. I3C Basic provides the ideal solution for all of these needs. It enables the system management architecture to provide detailed information about the state of server resources at startup and run time. This enables system administrators to implement efficient workload migration and server load balancing to significantly optimize server utilization.

     "Interfaces such as I2C and SMBus have been in use for decades, and their performance no longer meets the complexity of intelligent platform management in modern data center equipment," said Rami Sethi, vice president of Renesas' Electronic Data center Business unit. "We are excited to build a complete line of I3C bus extension devices for large-scale, high-speed control plane design with complex environmental control, advanced telemetry, security and fault recovery capabilities."