RSSLucent Unveils High-Speed USB 2.0 Chips
By Nate Mook | Published August 23, 2000, 5:08 AM
Lucent Technologies has taken the wraps off an integrated Universal Serial Bus (USB) 2.0 chipset that moves data between PCs and peripherals up to 40 times faster than the current crop of USB 1.1 specification chipsets. Announcing the speed throughput at the Intel Developer Forum Conference in San Jose late Monday, Lucent said that the USS-2000 host controller chipset can support a wide variety of higher-bandwidth peripheral devices.
These include high-resolution printers and scanners, digital video cameras, and DSL (digital subscriber line) and cable modems, using a much faster data transfer without compromising the performance of other peripheral devices plugged into the main USB of a PC.
Higher speeds were always built into the USB specification, but were never implemented because of the USB port's requirement to share data between the various USB peripherals. Lucent, however, says it has now beaten this speed limitation.
The most important feature of the new chipset, however, is that it is a single chip system, effectively reducing the USB hardware down to a single chipset, reducing the costs and time-to-market intervals for USB-connectible devices.
The new chipset, which was developed by Bell Labs, fully supports the USB 2.0 specification, which moves data at an impressive 480 megabits per second (Mbps).
Lucent says that the new chip can also service four 12 Mbps USB 1.1 hosts at the same time, meaning that each port has its own USB 1.1 dedicated host for full and low-speed device support.
Overall, this is twice the maximum USB 1.1 bandwidth seen on current USB systems. The doubling of bandwidth, Lucent says, is because the USS-2000 chip houses Lucent's USB 1.1 QuadraBus technology announced earlier this year.
Dan Devine, Lucent Microelectronics' USB product manager, said that his division has solved the bandwidth shortage problems for both current and future USB connections.
"The 12 megabits per second of shared bandwidth in USB 1.1 just isn't enough anymore. PCs, PCMCIA (Personal Computer Memory Card International Association) cards, and set-top boxes need more information carrying capacity to get more done faster," he said.
A spokesperson for Lucent said that the new chipset should start sampling to third-party firms during the fourth quarter of this year, with commercial production starting around the end of the year.
Lucent's USB Web site can be found at http://www.lucent.com/micro/usb.
Reported by Newsbytes.com, http://www.newsbytes.com.
I'm really interested in buying one of these units for field
recordings in WAV format. However, the NomadWorld site states that
the Interface (USB) is capable of a maximum of 500kbps. Now a quick
translation of 500kbps in kilo BITS per second terms (note the
lowercase b) means that it will take approximately 26 hours and 40
minutes to move the approximately 10hours of WAV sound files (for a
6GB hard drive) to my PC via USB, and that is the best case scenario.
If it is in fact kilo BYTES per second this reduces to approximately 3
and a half hours. That I can live with. A quick net search revealed
that USB is capable of a maximum of 1.5MB (mega BYTES) per second in
its FAST format and only 1.5 Mb (mega BITS) in its NORMAL format
(=0.1857 MB per second ).
Now here's the conundrum - If it is a Normal Speed USB (which I
suspect) then 0.5 MB per second is IMPOSSIBLE. If it is a FAST USB
port why do the folks at NomadWorld not say that OR qualify their kbps
rating?
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|480 Mbps Sounds Fast but Serial ATA was just demonstrated at INTEL's Developer Forum. With 1.5Gps only 9months away what will we want to run on USB2? My Mouse and Key board?
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|Serial still involves some degree of setup and system resources (COM ports/IRQs...). It also can't be daisy chained.
USB, on the other hand, can be daisy chained and has almost no setup (w/ a few exceptions, such as network cards need to have network settings) and also share most system resources.
Score: 0
|The question should be, with current Firewire speeds and the new firewire speeds coming out with the nextw generation of Firewire (and the talks of gigaspeeds for the third generation)... what's the use of USB. Okay I'm not positive that Firewire can be daisy chained but I'm pretty sure it can be. My memory escapes me right now. But I believe it is and that makes firewire better but the only problem is the industry hasn't embraced it as much as USB.
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|The point is Apple charges a $2 licence fee per port for firewire which doens't take into consideration the actual port hardware. Most manufacturers on very thing margins find this unacceptable. So USB 2.0 is a much cheaper standard to implement. Nice to see apple charge for there technology but rake all the technologies they wanted from the PC without paying a dime. Ala Imac and USB.
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|Firewire can be daisy chained. And will eventually run at 3.2 gig.
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|If you're paying $2 to Apple for each Firewire license you're getting ripped off. Firewire is Apple's fancy name for the IEE1394 standard that no one owns. i.Link from Sony is another branded version of this standard. You might get charged to use the Firwwire name but I can build a computer with IEE1394 interface ports and not give Apple one cent, as long as I don't call them Firewire ports.
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|Serial ATA has absolutely nothing to do with legacy serial ports. There won't be COM ports to contend with.
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|Just the fact that it is an International Standard doesn't mean that there aren't royalty fees to be paid. G723 (an ITU-T recommendation for speech coding) has royalty fees which are unavoidable for instance...
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|What good is all that bandwidth if none of your hardware can handle the workload all at once? ;p
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|I thought the reason USB is should be bothered with when there is firewire out.....
USB comes BUILT in to your motherboard at basically no extra $$ to me. Whereas firewire.. I should donate my first born..
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