One of the more interesting developments in recent months has been the soon to be universally available USB 3.0 technology that will see us jump from the current 2.0 speeds of 480Mbps to a rather impressive 4.8Gbps. For those that don't want to do the maths, that's 10x faster. Now though, on top of this already large speed bost, NEC have managed to further develop the technology to bring it up to an unprecedented 16GBps.

While a platform with this potential had been speculated about in the past, it was thought that at these throughput rates the information would become far too corrupted. However, NEC's new serial bus is what has made all this possible, utilising something called "adaptive equalisation" to correct this distortion. It achieves this by splitting the signal in two and feeding one of the streams into the input signal.

For those that want a real run down of what adaptive equalisation is, wikipedia describes it as, "an equalization filter that automatically adapts to time-varying properties of the communication channel. It is frequently used with coherent modulations such as phase shift keying, mitigating the effects of multipath propagation and Doppler spreading." Phew.

Apparently the problem with this though, is that the higher the frequency, the quicker the chip has to perform in order to reduce the distortion. NEC has said that they get around this by adding a delay to the feedback waveform.

"This procedure greatly reduces the nearest-neighbor inter-bit interference in the signal waveform and thus successfully alleviates the issue of feedback-time constraint inherent in conventional equalisers," said NEC's hardware developers.

This actually brings the USB platform very close to the speed of the latest generation of SATA and eSATA interfaces, which are just now seeing the jump to 6GBps with the "current" generation still lingering in 3GBps region. That said, this is the max speed of the devices, and the actual speed is based upon whatever hard drive that is connected to the SATA port; in the same way that USB devices are ultimately dependant on the device itself also.