NEC Develops Ways to Triple USB 3.0 Speed at 16Gbps

You may think that USB 3.0, or better known as SuperSpeed USB 3.0 is extremely fast but NEC, the famous Japanese PC maker has recently proved that they are capable to go beyond the limit. Theoretically, USB 3.0 compliant devices are able to achieve a maximum data rate of 4.8Gbps, which is about ten times faster than conventional USB 2.0 host port. But what being demonstrated by the Japanese PC maker recently has proven that there is still some headroom to get a serial bus running at 16Gbps, which is additional three to four times faster than the official specification released by USB Forum.

While it still retains exact similar bus with binary 1s and 0s stream transfer, the mechanism behind that really makes the difference is the use of ‘adaptive equalization’ that is able to split the extremely high speed data signaling into two paths and feedback part of it into original waveform to sustain stability at fast switching speed for better signal data integrity. And in order to cater for the new enhancement, a short delay has been added to reduce the occurrence of ‘nearest-neighbor inter-bit interference’ in the signal waveform.

Hopefully such a great technology breakthrough will be taken into consideration for future USB specification definition to allow an even higher data throughput delivery on next generation PC platforms.