The History of USB
USB is the most dominant interface for PCs and consumer products requiring frequent battery charging or data transfers. Through 2009, more than 10 billion USB ports will have shipped with annual shipments exceeding 3 billion. Leveraging the ubiquity and commonality of USB in today’s consumer devices, the USB-IF released the latest enhancements to USB, USB 3.0 on November 17, 2008. USB 3.0 offers a 5Gbps (10x increase) transfer rate and several “green” improvements including better power management, lower PC processor burden and lower total operational power, all while maintaining backwards compatibility with legacy ports.
The USB 3.0 Value Proposition for Consumer External Storage
Through 2009, more than 300 million USB 2.0 based external storage devices have shipped to date. By 2012, annual shipments are forecasted to exceed 120 million units, have an average storage capacity of over 2 TeraByte (2TB) and be entirely USB 3.0 based. As consumers embrace external storage for improved data integrity (backups), portability and long term media storage, the speed of data storage and retrieval becomes a critical factor in the end-user experience. This is especially meaningful with multi-TeraByte storage devices.
Table 1: USB Usage – Consumer Experience Tolerance
| |
500MB YouTube |
6GB
DVD |
16GB
Flash Drive |
25GB
Blu-ray |
1TB Backup |
USB 1.0 |
11 min |
2.2 hr |
5.9 hr |
9.3 hr |
372 hr |
USB 2.0 |
17 sec |
3.3 min |
8.9 min |
13.9 min |
9.3 hr |
USB 3.0 |
1.6 sec |
20 sec |
53 sec |
70 sec |
47 min |
Product Overview
Symwave’s USB 3.0 products include a SuperSpeed USB 3.0 PHY and a fully integrated USB 3.0 to SATA controller device (SoC with software). These devices will ship in volume production by year-end 2009. Symwave’s USB 3.0 development leveraged pioneering efforts in engineering that produced a family of multi-Gigabit/sec IEEE1394b (Firewire) PHY and controller devices. With these USB 3.0 and 1394b products, Symwave has established itself as a technology leader for advanced, high-speed connectivity solutions in a low-cost CMOS process.
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