The third-generation USB technology – also known as SuperSpeed USB or USB 3.0 – will see broad adoption across a range of personal computrs and PC peripherals over the next several years.  Among peripherals, SuperSpeed USB will be targeted initially at devices requiring high data transfer rates and large data stores, such as external hard-disk drives, flash drives, portable media players, cameras, LCD PC monitors and so on, according to In-Stat market research firm.

At present there are a lot of high-capacity external hard drives as well as flash drives, however, with capacities higher than 100GB – 200GB, transfer rates of USB 2.0 seem to be too low and 3.20Gb/s bandwidth provided by SuperSpeed USB is something what the doctor ordered even for modern external storage devices.

In-Stat projects that attach rates for SuperSpeed USB will soar to over 70% in external hard-drives by 2012, with similar attach rates in notebook and desktop PCs.  Initial products featuring USB 3.0 will likely emerge next year. By 2013, shipments of USB 3.0 flash drives will approach 200 million units worldwide.  Eventually, mobile phones will be the highest volume segment, simply due to the overwhelming volume phones shipped.  Overall, SuperSpeed USB will represent over 25% of the USB market by 2013.

“SuperSpeed may eventually move beyond those target applications requiring the highest bandwidth. However, in order to achieve broader adoption, cost will have to go down significantly. To get SuperSpeed USB costs down and increase attach rates, the technology will have to be integrated into the application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), and system-on-a-chips (SoCs), that power the peripherals,” said Brian O’Rourke, In-Stat analyst.

Tags: USB