The USB trade group has certified nearly 120 products that comply with its USB 3.0 specification aka SuperSpeed USB. The latest version upgrades USB's data rates from a maximum of 480 Mbits to 5 GigaTransfers/second.

The USB Implementer's Forum said it has certified a range of devices including motherboards, notebooks, external storage devices, storage controllers, hard disk drives, PCI Express and ExpressCard add-in cards and standalone chips.

¡°Since the first certified SuperSpeed USB product was announced last year at IDF 2009, we have witnessed exponential growth in the ecosystem,¡± said Jeff Ravencraft, president and chairman of USB-IF and an Intel executive.

Companies with certified products include Asustek, Buffalo, D-Link, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, PLX, Texas Instruments, Samsung and Western Digital. A "fast synch and go" feature is the driving user scenario for the technology, said Ravencraft, but engineers are working on a variety of uses for it.

NEC, now part of Renasas, said in March it had shipped three million USB 3.0 controllers and is now on track to ship 20 million chips this year. Taiwan's Gigabyte said it shipped a million motherboards supporting SuperSpeed USB in the first quarter of 2010 and expects to ship more than five million this year, said Ravencraft in a talk at IDF.

Market watcher In-Stat said it expects nearly 4.5 billion USB ports will ship in 2014, more than a billion of them supporting the version 3.0 spec.

In-Stat sees USB 3.0 (in red) rising in 2012--about the time it appears in chip sets.

The news comes at the opening of the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, something of a coming out party for USB 3.0. The arrival of USB 3.0 has been frustratingly slow, some peripheral and systems vendors said before the event.

Last year at IDF, Intel demonstrated Light Peak, an optical interconnect expected to be a sort of USB 4.0+. That took focus off the roll out of the first certified USB 3.0 products.

Making matters worse, sources said at that time Intel delayed for a year or more its plans to support USB 3.0 in its chip sets, putting off until 2011 or 2012 a mainstream market for USB 3.0 peripherals. At IDF Dadi Perlmutter, general manager of the Intel Architecture group, declined to say whether Intel's 2011 chip sets will support USB 3.0.

This year, sources said Intel refused to OK the version 1.0 of the USB 3.0 external host controller spec until this summer. That riled many peripheral and systems companies who said the external controllers and related products could have started shipping in 2009. The products based on external host controllers are starting to flow now.

A range of vendors including the DisplayLink, Fujitsu, the merged Renesas/NEC, Texas Instruments, SMSC and others are expected to show chips for the new USB 3.0 spec. Many of the initial products are focused on storage.

Ravencraft shows USB 3.0 motherboard

By: DocMemory
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