NEC develops new technology that provides 3x speed of USB 3.0!
Think USB 3.0 is the fastest? Think again. If NEC has its way then you’ll be soon looking at devices providing 16 Gb/s data transmission speed or 3 times the speed of USB 3.0 specification. This new technology allows inter-chip communication that is three times faster than modern communication interface standards, such as USB 3.0 and PCI Express 2.0, without using complicated transmission modes like multilevel transmission. The firm actually demonstrated a chip that is capable of transmitting data at such a high speed.
In recent years, due to the appearance of high-definition (HD) TV and 3D video content, the volume of data being processed for personal use has rapidly grown. This growth has resulted in greater demand for high speed transmission of data both between and within a wide variety of equipment. In order to provide for this demand, various types of sophisticated transmission schemes have been proposed to compensate for the large waveform distortion of input signals fed to the receiver, and to reach high-speed communications of more than 10 Gb/s to facilitate next-generation USB and PCI Express.
Conventional equalizers correct the distortion of a receiver’s input signal waveform by feeding back received data to the input signal waveform. However, as data rates grow higher, the time allowed for feedback operation becomes shorter, making the correction of distortion difficult.
In the newly developed technology, a feed-forward type waveform equalization is employed within the analog domain: the branched input signal is delayed by one data period and is then added to the original input signal 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.
