Silicon Motion Technology last week announced it has begun shipping USB drive manufacturers samples of a new USB 3.0 controller chip for flash drives that could boost their performance by up to 50 percent.


The company said the new SM3267 integrated controller is expected to deliver up to 160 megabyte-per-second read times and 60 megabyte-per-second write speeds through a single channel; that would be a 30 percent to 50 percent performance improvement over today's USB 3.0 flash drive technology.


Even though the USB 3.0 specification has the capability to support 4.8Gbps throughput speeds, the speed of a USB 3.0-enabled flash drive is dictated by the speed of the accessing flash devices in the drive. Today, most consumer-USB 3.0 flash drives support about 100MB/s read speeds.


"We are pleased to announce that SM3267 has received design-ins from most of our current USB controller customers, including many top-tier OEMs, and we expect SM3267-based USB 3.0 flash drives will be commercially available starting in the fourth quarter of 2013," Wallace Kou, CEO of Silicon Motion, said in a statement.


The new integrated chip will also be able to run at lower voltages, from 5 volts to 1.2 volts, enabling a 25 percent to 30 percent lower USB flash drive device temperature compared with other USB 3.0 flash controller products in the market, Silicon Motion said.


The new IC will support the vast majority of NAND flash technology, including new triple-level cell (TLC), multilevel cell (MLC), high speed Toggle, and ONFI DDR NAND manufactured by Samsung, Toshiba, SanDisk, SK Hynix, Micron and Intel.


The new chip has already passed both USB-IF compliance testing and WHCK (Windows Hardware Certification Kit) tests for Windows 7 and Windows 8.


The new IC is available in a Chip-on-Board (COB) and in a 48-pin QFN green package.








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