Second USB 3.0 Host Controller Certified

 

One of the fundamental principles of economics is that greater competition helps to drive down pricing. Well, we’ve got some great economic news for the SuperSpeed USB market: The USB Implementers ForumUSB Implementers Forum (USB-IF) has announced the second certified SuperSpeed USB host controller to pass USB testing certification: the FL1000 by Fresco Logic. This marks an important step in industry adoption of SuperSpeed USB solutions, and promises some major benefits for developers and consumers alike.

Having two certified host controllers helps create a competitive marketplace that ultimately delivers the best and most cost-efficient product to consumers. The NEC µPD720200 was the first host controller to pass SuperSpeed USB certification in September 2009. We can only expect that this latest release is the first trickle in a wave of SuperSpeed USB 3.0 host controller options.

“Certification of additional products supports second source alternatives and competitive ecosystems; the second certified USB 3.0 host controller builds upon the industry momentum for SuperSpeed USB, providing OEMs a crucial building block as they work to bring their SuperSpeed USB products to consumers worldwide,” said Jeff Ravencraft, USB-IF president, in a recent release.  “We are pleased with Fresco Logic’s contribution to the SuperSpeed USB ecosystem with its certified host controller. Certification ensures the best experience for consumers, and we encourage all companies developing SuperSpeed USB products to seek certification.”

Certification demonstrates that a product complies with industry standards and shows that it will be interoperable with other devices currently on the market. With these certified host controllers, designers can develop external hard drives, SSDs, flash drives and computers to take advantage of SuperSpeed USB technology, while still being fully backward compatible with USB 2.0 products currently available. For more information on USB certification testing,  testing for other industry standards, or for questions on designing end-products using SuperSpeed USB host controllers, contact Allion today.

PCIe 3.0 Released

A few months ago, we wrote about the industry’s anticipation for the latest version of the PCI Express (PCIe) specification. Well, the wait is finally over: the PCI Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG) has officially released PCIe Base 3.0. These latest specifications are currently available for PCI-SIG members. As a provider of PCI express standards testing, Allion is excited to learn about the newest version of this technology.

The PCIe v3.0 architecture offers notable improvements over PCIe v2.0 and optimizes the trade-offs between manufacturability, cost, power, complexity, and compatibility. The update doubles the interconnect bandwidth, offering a 128-bit/130-encoding scheme and a data rate of 8 gigatransfers per second (GTps). With the data rate expansion, “It is possible for products designed to the PCIe 3.0 architecture to achieve bandwidth near 1 gigabyte per second (GB/s) in one direction on a single-lane (x1) configuration and scale to an aggregate approaching 32 GB/s on a sixteen-lane (x16) configuration,” according to Benchmark Reviews. PCIe v3.0 is fully backward compatible with previous PCIe architectures and is optimally designed for high-volume platform I/O implementations.

“Each new version of the PCIe spec has doubled the bandwidth of the prior generation,” said Nathan Brookwood, research fellow at Insight 64, in a press release. “The latest group of PCIe architects and designers drove the standard forward while maintaining complete backward compatibility for Gen 1 and Gen 2 devices. Rarely has a standard advanced so non-disruptively through three major evolutionary cycles. The ability to pull this off demonstrates not only the ingenuity of the Gen 3 developers, but also the insight of those who defined the earlier versions in such an extensible manner.”

We’re excited that the wait is over, and we look forward to helping developers deliver exciting new PCIe products with our PCI testing services.