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Engineers at NEC have come up with a method to boost the speed at which data can be transferred over USB to a whopping 16Gb/s. The new technology increases the upper speed of USB 3.0 from an already rapid 5Gb/s to 16Gb/s – potentially allowing the transfer of hordes of data in the blink of an eye.NEC’s new technology works just like USB 3.0 and sends data as a stream of binary 1s and 0s. The difference lies in its ability to deliver and maintain high speed data transfer signals. The company has not actually developed a completely new bus; rather the scientists have come up with a way of delaying the rate at which data is fed back to the input signal.
It is first necessary to understand how SuperSpeed USB 3.0 works. When data throughput rates are very high, signals tend to become distorted.The new SuperSpeed USB 3.0 uses something called ‘adaptive equalisation’ to increase the stability of the carrier signal, allowing the data to be transferred significantly faster than has been previously possible without corruption.Under this technology, the signal is split into two and one part is fed back onto the input signal to give it stability.
However, when the frequency increases, the bus chip is expected to work a lot faster in order to complete the feedback and keep distortion in check. To work around this problem, NEC boffins seem to have found a method of adding a delay tied to the data rate to the feedback waveform.
“This procedure greatly reduces the nearest-neighbor inter-bit interference in the signal waveform and thus successfully alleviates the issue of feedback-time constraint inherent in conventional equalizers,” NEC’s scientists claimed. While the entire process might seem too complicated to be understood by normal computer users, it definitely seems to work.
So for all purposes, NEC now has a USB chip with the ability to transfer data at 16Gb/s. It now has to wait for the licensing bodies to license the new technology and open the doors for its use at a commercial level.
Although the technology only exists in prototype form, the next step for NEC is to apply to the USB Promoter Group – the licensing body for the USB standard – for permission to market the device under the USB brand. Assuming the technology works as well as NEC claims it does, it should only be a matter of time before the new speeds become standard fare.
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