According to the latest report released by In-Stat (News - Alert), the year 2008 will see the number of high-speed universal serial bus (USB)-enabled device shipments surpass those of low- and full-speed USB-enabled devices for the first time.

 

The biggest contributor to this anticipated success is the impending arrival of the SuperSpeed USB (also known as USB 3.0), the third major revision of the wired USB specification.

 

In-Stat's latest report predicts that the successful journey of the universal serial bus (USB) through 2007 , with more than 2.6 billion USB-enabled devices shipping in the PC, PC peripheral, consumer electronics (CE), communications, and automotive segments, is expected to continue with close to 4 billion devices shipping in 2012.

 

The CE segment has been a strong driver of this success, with continued adoption of USB in digital cameras, portable digital media players, and digital televisions

 

With an anticipated actual throughput of 3 gigabits per second (Gbps), the USB 3.0 version of the specification is far ahead of the existing high-speed USB 2.0 that was released in April 2000 and delivers a maximum transfer rate of 480 megabit per second (Mbit/s).

 

USB 3.0 will primarily be used by data- and media-intensive peripherals and consumer electronics, such as external hard-disk drives, portable digital media players, and digital cameras, as well as the PCs that these devices connect to.

 

The report also states that SuperSpeed USB-enabled products are expected to arrive on the market in late 2009, and shipments of SuperSpeed USB-enabled products are expected to multiply twenty-fold by 2012.

 

Intel Corporation, along with partner companies Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Texas Instruments (News - Alert), NEC and NXP Semiconductors formed the USB 3.0 Promoter Group in 2007 to create the SuperSpeed USB in order to address the need for fast transfer applications in the PC, consumer and mobile segments. Using the same architecture of wired USB (with the inclusion of a fiber optic link that works with traditional copper connectors), this new version is aimed to create a backward-compatible standard with the same ease of use and plug-and-play capabilities of previous USB technologies. The two main goals of SuperSpeed USB are to provide a 10-times boost in transfer rate (from 480-Mbits/s in USB 2.0 to 4.8 Gbits/s in USB 3.0), while dramatically lowering power consumption.

 

In-Stat's analyst Brian O’Rourke commented, “SuperSpeed USB is expected to begin shipping as discrete silicon in 2009 and broad deployment of SuperSpeed USB-enabled products is expected in 2010.”

 

“SuperSpeed USB will be targeted initially at the PC market and in devices requiring high rates and volumes of data transfer, such as external storage, CE, and communications devices with increasing amounts of storage.”