NEC Electronics America has recently unveiled its first prototype devices that support the USB 3.0 specification. The company has demonstrated the working of the new devices in the USB Tech Zone at Consumer Electronic Show (CES) 2009. The demonstration featured a USB 3.0 PHY test chip that is developed by NEC.

According to NEC Electronics the new USB 3.0 based prototypes can support data transfer speed 10 times faster than the legacy USB 2.0 specification offers. This means we can expect devices like the Integral Courier 16GB USB stick to transfer data ten times as fast in the future, which is an exceptional improvement. Morover, it’s also good news that the new USB 3.0 devices are compatible with the old USB 2.0 specification as well. However, plugging it into the old USB interface will of course force the device to work below its full potential. The company also revealed that it is currently evaluating a large number of USB 3.0 devices including bridge chips, hub controllers etc.

Katsuhiko Nakazawa, general manager for digital consumer and connectivity strategic business unit, NEC Electronics America commented, “NEC Electronics continues to deliver innovative solutions to help establish and promote the adoption of new USB specifications, and USB 3.0 represents a natural evolution of the USB standard, delivering greater transfer capabilities for today’s feature-rich consumer electronics products. As a leading supplier of USB and PCI Express technologies, we offer all of the building blocks required to develop the next generation of USB technology, and we are also working to develop new SuperSpeed USB devices that will offer the required performance increases and interoperability with existing USB standards needed to facilitate a smooth transition to the new standard.”

Tags for this article: ces 2009, chip, devices, las vegas, nec, superspeed, usb 3.0

Soon the world will move 10 times faster. The movement of the data among digital devices will accelerate incredibly. Soon the world will witness and experience the super power of the all new Universal Serial Bus version named USB 3.0.

This specification is still in its prototype stage, but it will hit the consumer market soon. The specifications of the USB 3.0 have already been decided and developed. USB 3.0 is aiming at a bandwidth which is 10 times faster than the current USB, i.e. USB 2.0. This new version has lots of awesome improvements. It will allow users to transmit data at a rate of 5Gbps. That means a PC user will now be able to transfer a whole DVD quality full length movie within seconds. Wouldn’t that be nice? It will totally change the way the world communicates, or in other words, the way various peripheral devices talk to each other.

Apart from the speed, one other major improvement in this new version is that it simultaneously supports two way communications (full duplex transfers). This means that the devices connected via USB 3.0 will be able to send, as well as receive, signals at the same time. This is in contrast to the USB 2.0 devices, like the Super Talent Pico, which can only transmit one signal at a time. It is believed that the new USB standard will also lead to better CPU usage and will be backward compatible with USB 2.0/USB 1.0 too.