Lucent Unveils High-Speed USB 2.0 Chips

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.