Renesas (who merged with the subsidiary NEC Electronics in April 2010) has just announced its third generation of USB 3.0 controllers. The PD720201 and PD720202 join the current (and omnipresent on motherboards right now) NEC PD720200/A and significantly improve its spec.
Renasas notes an improvement in speeds and a gain of more than 40% over the PD720200. Energy consumption without any peripheral connected also drops to 4.5 mW, or more than ten times less than the PD720200A, which scored 50 mW (at the same time as drawing 5 times less power than the PD7200200 which is currently found on most desktop motherboards). This is particularly welcome for laptops.
In addition to meeting the USB 3.0 1.0 spec (like their predecessors), versions 201 and 202 have also been announced as meeting
Intel’s xHCI 1.0 (against 0.96 previously). Apart from the size of the package, smaller on the 202 (7 mm by 7 against 8 mm by 8), the 201 also provides for 4 ports at the same time (finally!) instead of the previous two. The controllers still use a PCI Express 2.0 1x (500 MB/s in each direction) link however, which is equivalent to the theoretical bandwidth of a USB 3.0 port on its own. Availability of the new controllers has been announced for the month of September 2011 by Renasas.
