'World's first’ usb 3.0 host controller

The launch is a result of the growing need to transfer larger and larger amounts of information between PCs to external hard drives, portable electronics devices, and flash based thumb drives. The µPD720200 device is a host controller for PCs and other digital devices and supports usb transfer speeds of up to 5Gbps of data. NEC says that this is 10 times faster than previous usb 2.0 transfer speeds. The device is fully backward compatible with the usb 2.0, 1.1 and 1.0 versions of the usb standard. According to NEC, the SuperSpeed usb 3.0 chip requires 70 seconds to transfer 25GB of video content on a blu-ray disc, compared to 14 minutes to transfer the same content when using the high speed usb 2.0 with 480Mbps transfer capability. This increase in transfer speed has been designed to enable system designers to transfer large volume data quickly and develop a new generation of high performance consumer electronic products. Samples of the µPD720200 host controller are expected to be available in June 2009.