On April 11th, 2011, both Texas Instruments and Cypress Semiconductor made announcements concerning upcoming SuperSpeed USB (USB 3.0) Products. On the surface the two announcements are unrelated and in all honesty they really are totally unrelated.
We at TI announced that our 4-port SuperSpeed USB Extensible Host Controller (xHCI), TUSB7340, is the first 4-port xHCI device that has been certified by the USB Implementers Forum. It extends TI’s Industry broadest portfolio of SuperSpeed USB Products that includes the industry’s only SuperSpeed USB discrete transceiver, TUSB1310A; a 2nd generation of USB-to-SATA bridge, TUSB9261; both the above 4-port xHCI device as well as a 2-port version, TUSB7320; and a 4-port hub, TUSB8040.
Cypress announced that they will be releasing a new general purpose SuperSpeed USB peripheral controller branded EZ-USB FX3. The importance of this message is that this device will enable peripheral products NOT in the storage space.
The importance of these two messages is that SuperSpeed USB is real and continues to ramp at incredible rates. Just a little over a year ago at CES 2010, the first certified products were announced. Now 16 months later, there are well over 200 certified products including the first integrated core logic chipset from AMD!
SuperSpeed USB is here – what do you want to do with it?