Posted on Thursday, September 16 2010 @ 20:29 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
VIA Labs announced the VL75 SuperSpeed USB to NAND flash controller, a new chip that should enable manufacturers to create more cost-effective USB 3.0 flash drives with transfer speeds of over 100MB/s. The chip is sampling right now but the company didn't mention when it plans to start mass production.
VIA Labs, Inc., a leading supplier of USB 3.0 integrated chip controllers, today announced its latest USB 3.0 product, the VIA Labs VL750 Super-Speed USB to NAND flash controller, a revolutionary single-chip solution for the next generation of USB flash drives. The VIA Labs VL750 is the first of its kind in the world, featuring a 4-channel memory controller with interleaving support to offer consumers blisteringly fast data transfer speeds of 100MB/s or more, depending on configuration.
The VIA Labs VL750’s four channel design dramatically improves data throughput over dual or single channel designs by offering more bandwidth and improved parallelization. “VIA Labs is ahead of the pack by some distance when it comes to offering a complete USB 3.0 eco-system that now includes host, hub and NAND flash controller products,” said David Hsu, Associate Vice President, VIA Labs, Inc. “The VIA Labs VL750 will pave the way for fast, affordable, and large capacity flash drives of 32GB or more. Large files will become infinitely more manageable with most transfers completing in just a few seconds.”
The VIA Labs VL750 features USB mass storage class ‘Bulk-Only Transport’ for universal compatibility across platforms such as Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux, and adds USB Attached SCSI Protocol (UASP) support for additional performance. The VIA Labs VL750 is fully compliant with the USB 3.0 specification, and is also backwards compatible with USB 2.0 and 1.1 standards, offering class-leading performance in USB 2.0 mode with transfer speeds of up to 35 MB/s.
In addition to high performance, the VIA Labs VL750 is also designed for ease of implementation and support. Powered by multiple, advanced in-house PHYs, VL750 offers outstanding signal integrity characteristics and supports popular 2X-3X nm flash memories while consuming minimal power.
VIA Labs, Inc: Driving the USB 3.0 RevolutionThe VIA Labs VL750 is a crucial element in the broader transition to high quality multimedia content and more immersive and compelling applications which inevitably demand exponentially larger files sizes and storage mediums. The VIA Labs range of USB 3.0 controllers is enabling faster data transfer speeds of up to 5GBs per second, a ten-fold speed increase over today’s USB 2.0 standards.
The emergence of larger and faster NAND flash memories is also an important factor in the quickly evolving portable data storage industry. Exponentially faster speeds and large densities have completely saturated the USB 2.0 bus, making USB 3.0 essential in harnessing the enormous potential of tomorrow’s NAND flash memory products.
As one of the industry’s foremost suppliers of USB 3.0 components, VIA Labs today presented the VIA Labs VL750 at the Digitimes Tech Forum (DTF), a gathering of leading component manufacturers focused on exploring the opportunities created by new high speed transmission technologies including SuperSpeed USB.
