Flashing a NEC/RENESAS USB 3.0 uPD720200/uPD720200A firmware

It looks like NEC/Renesas are releasing steady releases of their popular USB 3.0 controllers drivers and firmwares. In case you have such a controller, you probably want to check the following page for the latest version.

One of the problems I found with the latest firmware update (4015) is that the GUI Renesas upgrade utility just didn't work for my controller, on Windows 7 x64. Even worse, it created commandline processes ad-infinitum, which, apart from obviously clogging up the system, is the last thing you want to see, as repeated erase/flash cycles can really wear out a flash chip.

The good thing however is that the firmware upgrade comes with a commandline flashing utility (W200FW35.exe), so you might as well use that, and flash the firmware manually. Having a commandline utility may also help with a flashrom implementation in the future, since it should be fairly straightforward to reverse engineer. The one thing you have to be careful of however, when using W200FW35.exe, is that you need to select the right SPI-Flash-ROM device type for flashing, and that the included batch files, which are set to a specific type, may not match the one you have.

Issuing W200FW35.exe /? will provide more information. First, in an elevated command prompt, start by issuing /srom ? to identify your chip and check that the flashing utility can access it:

C:\uPD720200_uPD720200A_FW_Updater>W200FW35.exe /srom ?
Bus:0x04 Device:0x00 Function:0x00
This Device is uPD720200A(Revision 4).
    W25X10BV/20BV/40BV(WINBOND)/EN25F05/10/20/40/(EON)/A25L512/010/020/040(AMIC) Type : 3, PageSize = 0x100, Chip Erase = 0xC7

Then, if you have a uPD720200A based controller, you probably want to issue:

W200FW35.exe /srom 0 /dump backup.mem
W200FW35.exe /srom 0 /write F401502.MEM cfg.ini

/srom 0 above ensures that the flash type will be autoselected. Or, in this case, we could have used /srom 3. If you use an srom parameter other than 0, be mindful that using the wrong type will result in both garbage in and garbage out.
As digitaldiatribe also points out, if you have more than one Renesas chip on your system, you will also need to add the /address switch to select the right one. Update: As pointed out by Eluder, the latest firmwares from Renesas no longer come with the W200FW35.exe commandline utility. It can still be obtained from the "3.0.2.8.0.8 (uPD720200) & 4.0.1.5.0.2 (uPD720200a)" archive available on the link provided above.