Is there a way to set a system-wide keyboard shortcut to open a new chrome tab (and highlight the address bar) in Windows?

I have a lot of really useful custom search engines in Chrome, as well as extensions that use the chrome omnibox. I do the following operation many times a day to access those search engines:

• Bring chrome to the front
• Open a new tab
• Type in my keyword and search term

Specifically selecting Chrome to bring to the front is by far the slowest part of that operation (that's because it's context-dependant - it depends on how many applications you have in front of it if you use alt-tab to tab through your open applications, or where your mouse is if you select chrome from your taskbar).

Far better would be to have a global keyboard shortcut that opens a new tab in Chrome from whatever you're doing and selects the omnibar. That would be completely context-free and you can let your muscle memory do the hard work.

Is there any way to configure this? Preferably natively in windows, but failing that with a Chrome extension.

Looks like the same question was asked for OSX.

w00t's solution of using a chrome extension with a global keyboard shortcut has the advantage of being OS-agnostic (and if I install it on Chrome on my windows machine I have it available on my Mac when I log in to my Chrome account).