Here you will see demonstrated the fastest USB 3.0 IP in the Universe*.  Or at least the fastest published numbers that isn’t marketing hype.

This demo shows SuperSpeed USB 3.0 effective throughput:

1. SuperSpeed USB 3.0 can really move data.
2. Synopsys USB 3.0 IP can really move data.

The demonstration includes our USB 3.0 xHCI Host Controller, USB 3.0 Device Controller, and USB 3.0 PHYs.

You have to actually watch the video to get see the effective throughput.

The Fastest USB 3.0 IP in the Universe

First, I have to say that that is about the most awesome thumbnail picture of me yet.  Thank you YouTube!

Second, we optimized the PC systems as follows:

1. RAM Drive on the Mass Storage Device side – This is a lot faster than a flash drive, an HDD, or an SSD.  There’s no SATA or PCIe for the data to pass through, so there is zero latency from an additional protocol.  The RAM is right next to the USB controller so there is basically zero read/write latency.
2. Windows 7 with an MCCI USB 3.0 xHCI Host Stack – Somehow MCCI engineered this so it’s faster than stacks we’ve seen packed with off-the-shelf Host cards.
3. Nothing else is running on the USB bus or PCIe bus on the PC.  Very little is running on the PC.
4. Standard PCs built with standard parts with SSDs (which aren’t really necessary but we wanted to make sure)
5. Our IP – Our USB 3.0 PHY IP, Our USB 3.0 Host IP, and Our USB 3.0 Device IP.

Okay, if you know a demo that is faster, send me the link or post the link below.  I haven’t seen a faster demo using a standard benchmarking tool.

Remember

Synopsys USB 3.0 IP can move data really, really fast.

 

Blooper Video

Somehow that Japan IP Team video hit over 330 hits as of the writing of this blog.

I will post it Thursday U.S. Time.

Probably.

 

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*It might not be the fastest USB 3.0 demonstration in the universe.  The title was to get your attention. Still try and find a demo, a real demo that is faster.

**A limit of 10 donuts will be given out.  Offer void where prohibited by law. (This means this offer is no good if it’s illegal where you are. I don’t know why it would be illegal.  Maybe the local authorities don’t like donuts.)

Because you read this blog, you already know that DisplayLink has taped-out a chip and started a second chip from our press release in October 2011.

DisplayLink makes a USB 3.0 to HDMI or DVI converter.

If you clicked on that image above, and nothing happened, it’s because it’s not a hyperlink, it’s just a picture.

The Video is below.

Here’s DisplayLink’s Theo Goguely talking about their product using the Synopsys USB 3.0 Device IP, USB 3.0 PHY IP, and HDMI Tx IP.

Here’s the 2 products that DisplayLink’s Theo Goguely demonstrated.

DisplayLink customer product #1: The IOData USB 3.0 to HDMI/DVI adapter using the DisplayLink chip.  Shown below.

DisplayLink customer product #2: And the Targus USB 3.0 Docking Station which you can buy at Office Depot, or just Google “Targus USB 3.0 Docking Station”

This Docking station includes a USB 3.0 Hub, and the DisplayLink chip downstream to provide the 2 video outputs.

In addition, DisplayLink customer product #3: The HIS USB 3.0 to HDMI adapter Here’s a 3rd USB 3.0 product that I found on the DisplayLink website.

Here’s where you can buy the HIS USB 3.0 to HDMI video adapter on NewEgg

And today’s Pastry selection

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Leave comments below, even if you disagree with me. 

Words will never hurt me.

Unless they are mean words.

Why does it matter that Synopsys has more than 30 customers and 40 design wins for USB 3.0?

An excellent question.

Let’s start with this: 

When will PCs have USB 3.0?

In April this year, AMD and the Innovator that invented USB announced USB 3.0 will ship in 2012.

When will Microsoft support USB 3.0?

In the past 5 weeks, Microsoft announced Windows 8 support of USB 3.0 and demonstrated USB 3.0 publically.

When will consumers demand USB 3.0?

Two weeks ago, during IDF 2011, the USB-IF presented InStat Data showing more than 1 Billion USB 3.0 enabled will ship in the next 2 years. 

To me this means if you are making anything with storage in it, a smart phone, a tablet, a camera, a video camera, a media player, it should have a USB 3.0 connection on it by 2014.

"In-Stat expects several hundred million USB 3.0-enabled devices will ship in 2012, including a large share of tablets, mobile and desktop PCs, external hard drives and flash drives," said Brian O’Rourke, research director at In-Stat. "By 2014, we expect many consumer electronics devices to transition to USB 3.0, including digital cameras, mobile phones and digital televisions. Overall, in 2014, we forecast that 1.4 billion USB 3.0 devices will ship. IP suppliers like Synopsys will help fuel this explosion in USB 3.0 adoption." – From our Press Release – Linked below

How long does it take for a product with our USB IP on it (or any IP) take to get to products on shelves?  About 2 years.

It seems to me that marketing people, should have an inner voice saying:

“PCs will have it.

Microsoft will support it

1 Billion products by 2013,

It takes me 2 years to get a product onto shelves,

I should really start on USB 3.0 now…”

– Inner voice, sounds like Spock, you know the logical one from Star Trek

Why do 40 design wins matter?

It matters because our customers use and test our IP in FPGAs and chips everyday in many ways.

It matters because when you choose USB 3.0 IP, host or device, you know that brave pioneers like Realtek and DisplayLink went first, taped-out, and are shipping chips in mass production. Realtek said,

"We taped-out Synopsys’ DesignWare USB 3.0 host and USB 3.0 device in three chips targeted at the digital home and PC peripheral markets, and all are now shipping in mass production," said Jessy Chen, executive vice president of Realtek Semiconductor Corporation. "We chose Synopsys DesignWare IP because of the company’s excellent track record in USB 2.0. With Synopsys’ USB 3.0 IP now fully certified and proven in our chips, we are certain we picked the right IP partner. We have been at the forefront of USB 3.0 development and integration, and have many innovative chips using Synopsys USB 3.0 IP coming in 2012." From our Press Release – Linked below

Why do 30 customers matter?

Customers use and reuse. These are companies that will take market share (maybe yours) because they have USB 3.0. DisplayLink said,

"Working with Synopsys for our USB 3.0 controller, HDMI controller and PHY IP helped us mitigate our project risk and reach volume production with our first-pass silicon," said Jonathan Jeacocke, vice president of engineering at DisplayLink. "In addition, we used Synopsys’ HAPS® FPGA-based prototyping solution to build fully functional systems for at-speed testing of USB 3.0 and HDMI, including architecture validation, performance testing, software development and customer demonstrations. We’ve already started our next design with Synopsys’ IP." From our Press Release – Linked below

Here’s the Press Release with the Quotes from InStat, Realtek, and DisplayLink.

Think about where your products need to be in 2 years. 

Keep your products on track for 2014.

It’s time to move now to USB 3.0.

I recommend Synopsys.  (I could be biased)

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Here’s a awesome video showing our USB 3.0 xHCI Host IP, and USB 3.0 Device IP on our HAPS platform with our USB 3.0 PHY IP Test Chips

We did this demonstration at IDF last fall, and you will see the performance is much faster that all of the published performance by, well pretty much everyone even now, 11 months later.

We optimized the controller, and the PHY, and the drivers to achieve these speeds.

You will notice that our USB 3.0 xHCI Host & PHY running MCCI’s Win 7 drivers and and the USB 3.0 Device & PHY have no problem achieving these speeds.

The HAPS boards with our controller design in FPGA also easily supports USB 3.0.  We use our PCIe controller to connect to the PCIe on the PCs so there is no latency introduced there. 

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DisplayLink now has the worlds first & only USB 3.0 to Dual Display Video Chip available for OEMs. 

Here’s a demonstration of their DisplayLink with us at IDF.

The chip lets you daisy chain up to 6 USB monitors, which means that the bandwidth of USB 3.0 let’s you run 6 displays running 1080p video.

Video Compression over USB 3.0

DisplayLink’s Jason Slaughter explains why DisplayLink uses Video Compression to move HD video over USB 3.0. 

So the compression is necessary to overcome any system latencies and provide the responsiveness we expect from our computers. 

Question of the Day

What’s significant about a Dual Display Chip?  Why would I want this?

Answer in the comments below.

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Today at the Flash Memory Summit, Lexar’s Jonathan Hubert presented “The Future of High Performance Flash Cards.”   The proposed standard called “BluLightning” transfers data faster than SDXC. In fact, BluLightning uses USB 3.0.

The Problem

Anyone buying a digital camera these days knows that transferring 2 or 4 or 8 GB of pictures takes forever.  This is limited by the card speed itself.  You can see from the LegitReviews.com website that the faster card readers are limited to about 27 MB/s.  This speed is probably limited by the SD read speed more than anything else. USB 2.0 might be the bottleneck, if it’s a bad host implementation or a poor host PHY, or similarly on the Device.  These days,the cheapest give-away USB flash drives still have this problem.

The fastest SD standard, SD UHS-1 goes up to only 104 MB/s compared to USB 3.0’s 320+ MB/s.   But, to my knowledge, these devices aren’t yet available.  If SD UHC-1 was available, you’d need a USB 3.0 card reader to make it work fast.

The point is this, the bottleneck is the flash card standard, not USB 2.0. 

The Solution – BluLightning

BluLightning is a flash card form factor with the same volume and physical dimensions of a CompactFlash cards.  BluLightning uses USB 3.0 to provide a really fast data transfer PIPE from something like a Digital Camera to a Flash Memory Card.     USB 3.0 at 320+ MB/s  runs faster than SD UHS-1 at 104MB/s.   This means that there is room to grow.  You can use USB 3.0 to get your photos and videos from your Card to your PC much, much faster.  This is even more important for HD DVCs that record Gigabytes of data per hour of HD video recorded.

I should point out at this point that this eliminates the need for a Card Reader, you just use a standard USB 3.0 Cable. So that saves Consumers some money.  You can use the same USB 3.0 cable for your camera, DVC, or card reader.

So speed is good, but why is BluLightning cool?

BluLightning cleverly employs USB 3.0 standard protocols, electricals, connectors, and cables.

Um, again, why is this cool?

This means that you can re-use existing USB 3.0

1. Software Drivers & Stacks – you can leverage open source drivers, 3rd party software like those from our USB Software Alliance
2. IP/Cores/Controllers – The protocol engines can be used “as is” like the IP from Synopsys
3. PHYs – The PHYs are identical to existing USB 3.0 IP

It turns out that Synopsys has all this USB IP, specifically USB 3.0 PHY IP, USB 3.0 Digital Cores, and USB 3.0 VIP.

And our USB Software Alliance partners with USB 3.0 can provide compatible drivers and stacks.

Wow, that will save me months, and months of engineering time and money, while lowering my risk at implementing a new standard!

Probably. I couldn’t have said it better myself.

That’s not very objective!

BluLighting solves a problem everyone with a Digital Video Camera knows about and can feel.   (and Camera owners too).  The more leverage we get as an industry from existing standards, the faster we can get time to result, time to market, and value into consumers hands.

Who backs this standard today?

“BluLightning is a Lexar initiative with open industry meetings under the Compact Flash Association”*

This means the people that actually build digital cameras and DVCs

think and breathe this everyday and night.

How do I find out more?

Ask questions below, I’ll answer. I can get answers from Jonathan and his team behind BluLightning.  I’ll post more on this in the next few days including more on form-factor, applications, and other interesting stuff.

*All the data, graphics, basically everything on BluLightning was taken from Johnathan Hubert’s presentation with permission of Lexar.

**All opinions are mine, and mine alone. (But you knew that).

We’ve achieved read speeds of 320 Megabytes per second (MBps) with the following configuration:

Synopsys USB 3.0 xHCI Host Controller

• Running on the Synopsys HAPS 51FXT FPGA
• With our Synopsys SuperSpeed USB 3.0 65nm PHY
• On Windows 7
• Running the MCCI USB 3.0 Host Stack and Drivers

On the Device side we use the Synopsys USB 3.0 xHCI Host Controller

• Running on the Synopsys HAPS 51FXT FPGA
• With our Synopsys SuperSpeed USB 3.0 65nm PHY
• On Linux
• Running Synopsys Mass Storage Reference Firmware

Our 320 MBps Read Speed means our Host, Device, and PHY with the MCCI Drivers runs faster than any other combination out there.

Here’s the demo video

So we can achieve these speeds with our USB IP (cores and PHYs).    This is the fastest we’ve see yet.  If you’ve seen faster speeds, let me know.

Latest USB 3.0 Performance – 5 Flash Drives

The latest speeds I’ve seen published can be found at Tom’s Hardware here.  In the review of 5 USB 3.0 Flash Drives/SSDs including the OCZ Enyo, Walton Chaintech, SuperTalent (2 versions) and PQI SSD S533-Es.  If you read through the data, you will see that most of the devices read at up to about 180 to 190 MBps, with the fastest reads at up to 220 MBps.  This is about 6-7x faster than the typical USB 2.0 performance of 32MBps.

As I’ve mentioned before, there are a lot of reasons for this potential slowness relative to where USB 3.0 should be including:

On the Host Side

• Host Controller latencies/quality
• Host Operating System latencies
• Host Stacks and Drivers

On the Device Side

• Device Controller (on the peripheral) latencies/quality
• Device OS latencies
• Device Stacks and Drivers
• Quality of the PHYs on both the Host and the Device
• Latencies to access the Device memories

So while the performance of the devices tested by Tom’s hardware, it can be better.  It should be better. 
In fairness to the devices, the quality of the Flash makes a big difference, and if the device uses cheap, cheap flash, access times will be slow because cheap flash just doesn’t have fast access.

(I’d like to point out that our demonstration achieves 10x USB 2.0 speeds, with Windows 7 and MCCI drivers and our PHY and our controllers, without any optimization on our part yet)

I’ve been getting a lot of requests for our USB 3.0 IP videos lately, so I’ve decided to embed them all into a single webpage here.  These are all the videos of our USB 3.0 PHY, Device, xHCI Host, and Hub we have posted in the past 18 months.

USB 3.0 Device IP & USB 3.0 PHY IP Certified SuperSpeed USB Demo at DesignCon  2010

USB 3.0 PHY IP and USB 3.0 Device IP Demo

Gervais Fong, USB PHY Product Marketing Manager, demonstrates our USB 3.0 PHY IP and USB 3.0 Device IP on HAPS at DesignCon 2010 in April 2010.

DisplayLink USB 3.0 Video Streaming Demo at CES 2010

Dennis Crespo,Executive VP of Business Development and Marketing at DisplayLink, and Gervais Fong, USB PHY PMM, demonstrate 1080p video through the Synopsys USB 3.0 Device IP, a TI PHY, and Synopsys HDMI Tx Digital IP using the Synopsys HAPS FPGA board. CES January 2010

DisplayLink USB 3.0 Streaming Demo with Synospys USB 3.0 PHY IP, USB 3.0 Device IP, and HDMI Tx IP

TI USB 3.0 PHY with Synopsys USB 3.0 IP

TI USB 3.0 PHY, Synopsys USB 3.0 Device IP and USB 3.0 Hub IP demo

Scott Kim from TI demonstrates the TI USB 3.0 PHY * Synopsys USB 3.0 Device IP and Hub IP Controller at IDF Fall 2009.

MCCI USB Software with Synopsys USB IP

MCCI USB 3.0 Media Player MTP software with Synopsys USB 3.0 IP

Terry Moore, CEO of MCCI, demonstrates MCCI’s USB Drivers for Mobile Phones running on our USB 3.0 Device Controller at IDF Fall 2009.

USB 3.0 IP Host, Hub, and Device Demos

Synopsys USB 3.0 Hub IP, USB 3.0 Device IP Demo

Eric Huang, USB 3.0 Digital Cores PMM, demonstrates the Synopsys USB 3.0 Device, xHCI Host, and Hub at IDF F
all 2009. Sept 2009

Synopsys USB 3.0 xHCI Host IP running on Linux, Streaming Video

This is the first public demonstration of the Synopsys USB 3.0 xHCI Host IP Controller at IDF Fall 2009

Scott Kim, TI Business Development, and Eric Huang, USB 3.0 Digital Cores demonstrate the TI PHY and Synopsys USB 3.0 Device Controller in a Mass Storage prototype in April 2009.

Synopsys USB 3.0 Device and Host IP Demonstration streaming data at 450+Megabytes per second

Synopsys’ first demonstration of USB 3.0 device and host prototypes back in Fall 2008.  This demonstrations shows how Synopsys built the IP to support the fastest possible USB 3.0 speeds on thin Linux operating systems.

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Updated May 3, 2010: Video Embedded and Linked

Hi Everyone,

We have posted a new video demonstrating our USB 3.0 Device and Host controller working with the USB 3.0 PHY from TI.   This is significant because it shows that our two companies and our two teams of engineers have interpreted the same specification so that products can be built using our IP and TI’s chips.

You can see the video here if the YouTube doesn’t work.
http://www.synopsys.com/IP/pages/Videos.aspx

Rehash below:

As I posted before: We demonstrated our USB 3.0 Device with the TI USB 3.0 PHY at the USB Developers Conference in Tokyo, Japan May 20-21, 2009

The press releases can be found here.

TI’s release:  http://sev.prnewswire.com/semiconductors/20090514/DA1701914052009-1.html

Synopsys release:  http://synopsys.mediaroom.com/index.php?s=43&item=683