Posted on Friday, November 05 2010 @ 18:46 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
VIA Labs announced it partnered with American Megatrends to make the VL800 USB 3.0 host controller xHCI compliant for motherboards with AMI UEFI:
Systems utilizing the VIA Labs VL800 USB 3.0 host controller will now enjoy complete USB 3.0 support using AMI UEFI and Legacy BIOS solutions
Taipei, Taiwan, 4 November 2010 - VIA Labs, Inc., a leading supplier of USB 3.0 integrated chip controllers, today announced their collaboration with American Megatrends Inc, to bring xHCI support to the next-generation Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI).
The eXtensible Host Controller Interface (xHCI) architecture provides a new industry standard for interfacing to USB devices, and delivers the extensibility necessary to meet today's needs for speed, power savings, and virtualization support. With greatly improved protocol efficiency, xHCI enables platforms to become more power efficient without sacrificing performance. xHCI and UEFI enable robust USB resource management and add support for native USB device sharing across virtual machines.
AMI's BIOS module provides essential support for the new architectures, and allows customers to begin utilizing USB 3.0 in the pre-boot environment.
"As the USB 3.0 market matures and VIA Labs' VL800 host controller enters production, we find that more of our customers are making the move to UEFI and require BIOS support for xHCI," said David Hsu, Associate Vice President, VIA Labs, Inc. "Our work with AMI is crucial to enabling us to bring to market USB 3.0 host controller products that challenge current limitations. While the majority of systems equipped with USB 3.0 are shipping with only one or two SuperSpeed ports, the next wave of devices will support four or more, and now with BIOS support, the 4-port VL800 is well positioned for that transition."
"xHCI will become the mainstream and market trend of USB support and will be the version targeted by the major OS and chipset vendors," said S. Shankar, President and CEO of American Megatrends. "Now that USB 3.0 has become one of the key technologies for our customer's products, AMI's support for xHCI will give these customers peace of mind, knowing that the products they are delivering today will be viable as adoption of USB3.0 becomes further entrenched. Providing first access to key new technologies is one of the primary components for maintaining strong, long-term partnerships with our customers."
