NEC develops world's first USB 3.0 host controller

We all will get faster USB devices very soon. NEC Electronics just announced the µPD720200 chip, which is the world’s first USB 3.0 host controller.

The so-called SuperSpeed controller features a transfer speed of up to 5Gbps, which is ten times faster than USB 2.0. NEC claims that it takes just 70 seconds to transfer 25GB of data to a Bluray disc, for example. The same procedure would take 14 minutes via a USB 2.0 connection.

The controller also supports USB 1.0, 1.1 and 2.0. NEC plans to ship the first batch of samples of the chip to customers as early as next month with each unit priced at $15. The company says it wants to produce one million chips monthly by september.