SMSC has announced two new families of USB 2.0 flash media readers. Designed to improve performance of Hi-Speed flash media, the USB2240 and USB2250 are capable of speeds as high as 35MB/s. The USB2250 also offers greater flexibility by reading two different flash media formats at once.
SMSC (Nasdaq: SMSC), a leading semiconductor company providing innovative system solutions spanning analog, digital and mixed-signal technologies, today announced two new families of USB 2.0 Flash media readers designed to enable greater throughput and flexibility in consumer electronics and computing applications. The USB2240 and USB2250 Hi-Speed USB 2.0 controller families support a wide range of Flash media cards with improved data transfer performance, delivering higher data throughput and catering to new high speed formats.

The popularity of USB 2.0 makes the technology a preferred interface for removable storage media in consumer electronics and computing platforms. SMSC’s new generation of USB Flash media controllers reduce bottlenecks with throughput speeds up to 35 MB/s - nearly twice as fast as previous generations of SMSC Flash media controllers. This bandwidth increase enables a host of rich-content applications, including streaming video, fast multimedia file transfer and higher performance of computing technologies like ReadyBoost for Windows Vista. In trials using ReadyBoost, a technology that employs external Flash memory to boost performance in the Vista operating system, SMSC’s new Flash media readers delivered significantly better performance than systems without high-performance Flash media readers.
If you'd like to read more, SMSC's entire press release can be found here.