NEC has announced that they’re ahead of others to have produced the world’s first hardware controller that supports the USB 3.0 standard. The little controller chipset is called µPD720200, lets computers and other devices communicate with USB 3.0 peripherals and allows the theoretical maximum data transfer speed of 5Gbps – about 10 times faster than USB 2.0.
The USB 3.0 chipset is also backward compatible with USB 2.0 and USB 1.1 devices although USB 3.0 ports won’t support USB 1.x. This chipset will be very much useful for external storage drives such as external USB hard drive or solid state drive. With the tremendously high speed of data transfer, launching applications or copying data from the drives will be very much faster than what USB 2.0 can handle.
The test versions of the USb 3.0 chips will be shipped to companies building USB 3.0-complaint devices next month and it’ll only cost those companies $15 per part. The time when the first product that carries this chip will surface in the market is still unknown. But the expectation is the shipment of the chips will climb up to 1 million per month in September. And we shall see lots of USB 3.0 devices coming into the market in second half of 2010. Get ready your pocket for a new external USB 3.0 SSD by year end of 2010.
via everythingusb
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