NEC develops new data transfer standard

Three times faster than USB 3.0

Japanese electronics firm NEC has announced the development and successful demonstration of a new technology for next-generation high-speed serial communication interfaces.

NEC's new interface allows chip-to-chip data rates of 16 Gigbits per second - three times faster than current interface standards, like USB 3.0 and PCI Express 2.0 - without resorting to multilevel transmission.

We'll let the boffins at NEC explain how it works: "Conventional equalisers correct the distortion of a receiver's input signal waveform by feeding back received data to the input signal waveform. However, as data rates grow higher, the time allowed for feedback operation becomes shorter, making the correction of distortion difficult.

"In the newly developed technology, a feed-forward type waveform equalisation is employed within the analogue domain: the branched input signal is delayed by one data period and is then added to the original input signal waveform. This procedure greatly reduces the nearest-neighbour inter-bit interference in the signal waveform and thus successfully alleviates the issue of feedback-time constraint inherent in conventional equalisers."

Simple.