NEC Electronics and Western Digital jointly promote the popularization of USB3.0

NEC Electronics and Western Digital jointly promote the popularization of USB3.0

NEC Electronics and Western Digital Corporation, a world-leading supplier of hard disk drives, recently announced that they will cooperate in the field of USB 3.0 technology to jointly promote this standard interface specification for use in digital devices such as computers.

The data transmission speed of USB3.0 can reach 5Gbps, which is more than 10 times that of USB2.0, the mainstream product on the market. It will initially be used in external hard drives.

As the first step of this cooperation, NEC Electronics and Western Digital will jointly develop a UASP (USB Attached SCSI Protocol) hard disk driver that can achieve high-speed data transfer of large-capacity hard disks. UASP is a new version of the mass storage device (Mass Storage) transmission standard used to replace the USB 2.0 BOT (Bulk Only Transfer) protocol in the USB 3.0 era. The UASP driver jointly developed by NEC Electronics and Western Digital will be based on the first USB 3.0 control chip µPD720200 launched by NEC Electronics in June 2009.

The UASP driver jointly developed by the two parties has the following features:

(1) Support the new version of UASP, the mass storage device transmission standard;

(2) Compared with BOT standard, the transmission speed can be increased by more than 30%;

(3) At the same time, NEC Electronics can provide licenses to companies that wish to develop UASP standard chips.

Western Digital has advanced data storage technology, and NEC Electronics has actively participated in the formulation of USB standards. The cooperation between the two companies will further promote the development of the USB3.0 market, realize the practical application of high-performance USB communication as soon as possible, and launch the USB3.0 system into the market.