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

The 2009 Consumer Electronic Show (CES 2009) is ready to raise the curtain in Las Vegas next week. There has been a lot of buzz created regarding the show up to now and the masses are getting more and more excited as the opening day gets closer. The CES 2009 is expected to be very enthusiastic about the unprecedented technology, gadgets and gizmos it unleashes upon consumers. This show will introduce consumers all the latest jaw dropping technological enhancements electronics companies have to offer.

You can view everything there. Right from laptops to sub-netbooks, smartphones to GPUs, LCDs to touch screens, the CES 2009 will be portraying each and every electronic device that can change your digital lifestyle. Although there were many new jaw dropping developments that took place last year, some of them were simply marvellous. Below are some of the great gadgets that are scheduled to be displayed at the CES 2009.

Both Lenovo and HP will be unveiling the concept of the dual screen laptop. For the first time, these two companies will be developing laptops with two displays. Next comes the new touch screen netbooks. The touch screen technology is always liked by the end user and the CES 2009 will show off some of the new improvements in touch screen netbooks developed by Intel. Apart from this, Samsung and Sony are also busy preparing for the show. These two IT giants will be showing their talent in the field of organic LCD displays. The main attraction will be the new wafer thin displays that possess an unbelievable thin form factor. Sony may also unveil its first touch screen walkman, which is set to compete with the Apple iPod touch. Samsung’s Android powered smartphone will also be in the limelight at CES 2009. All in all, it is set to be a great show and we can’t wait.

The upcoming Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas is the stage at which many companies are presenting new and exciting mobile computing devices this year. One common theme among a few top notch computing device manufacturers is that all of them are putting emphasis on introducing dual screens in laptops. A few days back Apple talked about its Tribook having three displays. After that the Lenovo announced the coming of its dual screen laptop and now the HP has decided to do the same thing.

The Hewlett Packard is going to develop a dual screen laptop with an advanced configuration. The laptop is called Firefly and is especially geared towards hardcore gamers and multimedia fans with its specifications that outdo most rivals, including the Hewlett-Packard HP Pavilion DV7-1020 laptop. The Firefly will contain high performance hardware chips in its compact body that will make this device a complete desktop replacement gadget. Firefly will also possess a 20 inch enclosure. It will have a primary display of 17.1 inches (1920×1200 pixels) and a secondary display of 4.3 inches (800×480 pixels) that is positioned underneath the primary one. At its core, the Firefly is powered via Intel Core 2 Extreme processor running at 2.4 GHz. 4GB of RAM, as well as two ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3870 GPUs running in CrossFire mode are also onboard. As far as storage is concerned, this laptop equips a 250GB hard disk drive running at 7200rpm.

Such a high end configuration definitely makes the Firefly a gaming monster. You can play any game on it smoothly with all the advanced graphics settings on at a high resolution.

Symwave, the leading semiconductor supplier of high-performance analogue/mixed-signal connectivity solutions for the PC, consumer and mobile devices, is ready with the world’s first consumer application of SuperSpeed USB 3.0. The new application will offer an incredible data transfer rate (10 times faster than the legacy USB 2.0) as it will run on the third version of Universal Serial Bus architecture.

The company is collaborating with the leading cable, components and hard drive manufacturers to demonstrate the transfer speeds of USB 3.0 at the consumer Electronics Show or CES. It will demonstrate an unprecedented data streaming to and from external storage devices at a speed which was unattainable previously. The demonstration will take place at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada from 8th Jan 2009 to 11th Jan 2009.

The SuperSpeed USB is set to amaze the next digital generation and will hit the technology market in the second half of next year. So we will have to wait until then before seeing actual flash drives, like the Fujifilm USB Drive 2GB, which use the USB 3.0 standard, instead of the current USB 2.0 profile. Till now the interested parties have read about the technical specifications and capabilities of the USB 3.0 in theory only but now the demonstration by Symwave will let them experience the amazing powers of the new USB in real time and will give a clearer idea about the upcoming technology.

Solid State Drives or SSDs are creating a buzz in the mobile computing market these days. Because of the reliability and performance offered by these storage drives they were expected to replace standard hard disks. However this has not happened completely because of two major reasons. The first is that SSDs are very costly and other reason is that they only offer a maximum storage capacity of up 256GB, but most offer far less, like the Transcend ExpressCard/34 SSD SLC 32GB. On the other hand, the legacy HDDs are cheaper and offer more than 500GB of storage capacity, thereby preventing SSDs from taking over completely.

However, the gap in the storage capacity has been bridged by Toshiba. The company is going to unveil its new SSD which will offer half a terabyte of storage, i.e. 512GB at the Consumer Electronics Show to be held at Las Vegas next month. Toshiba has made this drive using its 43-nanometer Multi-Level Cell NAND flash technology. The drive is capable of offering sequential read speed of 240MB per second and a data write speed up to 200MB per second. The company has not announced the cost of the SSD yet. So it’s not known whether the drive will come with an affordable price tag or if, like the other SSDs, it will also charge the end users heavily in return for such a massive storage capacity. The drive is expected to hit the consumer markets in the second quarter of 2009.