If you think that the new SuperSpeed USB 3.0 kit coming out is ever so fast, you’ve got another thing coming!  At least NEC thinks so.  They laugh at the slowness of USB3′s measly 4.8Gb/s.

Why?

Because they have something better.

NEC isn’t tackling any specific serial communication protocol itself.  No, it’s attacking the flaws in the adaptive equalizers used to clear up the signals transmitted over the serial bus.  Because signals, especially over long cables, tend to degrade.  They need cleaning up.  And NEC reckons that it has found a better way to do just that, by adding a delay in the feedback waveform to clear up the signal.  As they say:

“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 equalizers.”

The result?  A serial bus that can hit 16Gb/s, more than three times faster than USB3, says NEC.  And this concept, they say, can be applied to any serial communication by using their technique to improve the interface chips, continuing to use the same bus.

Perhaps EvenMoreSuperSpeed USB 4.0 with 16Gb/s transfers is just around the corner then.  Or even PCI Express 4.0 with 3B/s at 1x and 48GB/s at 16x.  According to NEC, it’s possible.