It has taken USB 3.0 a serious amount of time to really gain steam in the industry, but late really is better than never in this case. More and more machines are shipping with USB 3.0 support, and rumors are flying that next-gen Intel chipsets will support the protocol natively. Texas Instruments has today announced that it is the first semiconductor company to receive certification from the USB Implementer's Forum (USB-IF) for its SuperSpeed USB (USB 3.0) four-port extensible host controller (xHCI). That may not sound like anything important to you, but if you're hoping for more USB 3.0-enabled machines to ship, it is.

In addition to the four-port host controller, the TUSB7340, TI also achieved certification for its two-port host controller, the TUSB7320. These four- and two-port host controllers support such applications as notebooks, desktop computers, workstations, servers, add-in cards and ExpressCard implementations, as well as PCIe-based embedded host controllers for HDTVs, set top boxes and gaming console applications. In other words, the certification of this product will almost definitely lead to more USB 3.0 implementations in the market, though there's no clear indication of when that would happen.


Granted, we feel fairly confident that TI wouldn't be gloating about this if they weren't prepared to ship in short order, so hopefully we'll see just that in the near, near future.