Vecow UE-1000 Renesas uPD720202 USB 3.0 PCIe Cards with Four Independent Controllers

USB3 cameras and scanners are quick to deploy, but the USB controllers built into most hosts are shared across several ports, and a busy camera can starve its neighbours. The Vecow UE-1000 series puts four independent USB 3.0 host controllers on one PCIe card, so the camera load is spread across controllers rather than queued on one. We supply each card configured and tested, fitted in the host with the drivers installed.

Every UE-1000 card uses four Renesas μPD720202 host controllers behind a PCI Express x4 interface, compliant with USB 3.0 Revision 1.0 and Intel xHCI Revision 1.0. Ports run at 5 Gbps SuperSpeed, with 480 Mbps, 12 Mbps and 1.5 Mbps for older devices. A jumper per port sets a 900 mA or 1500 mA current limit to suit the device attached, and remote power on/off per port is optional, controlled through Vecow’s hardware monitor utility, console tool or API, which helps reset a camera without a site visit. A 4-pin 12 V ATX connector supplies additional power when the PCIe bus is not enough.

The series has two models. The UE-1004 carries four USB 3.0 Type-A ports, one per controller, for systems where each camera needs a full controller to itself. The UE-1008 carries eight Type-A ports on the same four controllers, so pairs of ports share a controller, which suits hosts that run many USB devices or a mix of cameras and lower-bandwidth peripherals. On the UE-1008 it is usually worth pairing each high-bandwidth camera with a lower-bandwidth device, so no controller carries two full camera streams. Both models share the controllers, jumpers and power control utility, so the driver set in the host image stays the same whichever card a project uses.

Both UE-1000 cards use a full-height bracket and run from 0 °C to 70 °C, with storage from -40 °C to 85 °C. Vecow lists FCC and CE with RoHS compliance for the UE-1000 series, and names traffic surveillance, logistics, factory automation, machine vision, factory inspection, medical and security among its uses, with digital USB 3.0 cameras as the typical attached device. The operating range suits a host in a ventilated cabinet on a production line or in a warehouse.