NEC Electronics America brings USB 3.0 connectivity for feature-rich CE applications to CES 2010

LAS VEGAS, USA: NEC Electronics America, Inc. will highlight the latest generation of Universal Serial Bus (USB) technologies at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES®) January 7-10 in Las Vegas.

A working demonstration of the company’s USB 3.0, or SuperSpeed, capabilities will be showcased in the USB TechZone, located in the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC) South Hall 3, booth #30769.

Daily demonstrations of NEC Electronics’ USB 3.0 host controller (part number µPD720200), the industry’s first USB-IF-certified USB 3.0 product, will feature a laptop computer with two USB 3.0 ports, with one port sending a video file at the SuperSpeed transfer rate to a USB 3.0 external storage device.

To demonstrate the backward compatibility of the USB 3.0 host controller, the second port will send the same video file to a USB 2.0 external storage device for comparison. Samples of customers’ motherboards and cards using NEC Electronics’ USB 3.0 device also will be on exhibit.

NEC Electronics introduced the industry’s first USB 3.0 host controller device in May 2009, and confirmed certification from the USB-IF—another industry first—in September 2009. USB 3.0 prototype devices will support data transfer speeds up to 10 times faster than USB 2.0 transfer speeds, and also will support backward compatibility in consumer electronic devices based on the current USB specification.

CES attendees can learn more about NEC Electronics’ USB 3.0 system-on-chip (SoC) design solution, introduced in September 2009. Designers can use the solution to kick start the development of custom USB 3.0 products such as mass storage, display and video.

The SoC design solution helps to reduce risk, improve efficiency and speed time to market, while allowing customers to focus on developing their own differentiated logic. The SoC design solution features NEC Electronics’ USB 3.0 intellectual property (IP) core, which is fully interoperable with the company’s USB 3.0 host controller and also backward compatible with the USB 2.0, 1.1 and 1.0 versions of the USB standard.

NEC Electronics expects rapid adoption of the platform as the need to transfer larger and larger amounts of information from PCs to external hard drives, portable electronic devices, and flash-based thumb drives, continues to grow.