Universal serial bus (USB) ports are the standard connection for a variety of electronic peripherals, from printers and digital cameras to flash drives and scanners. By the end of 2009, a new design and protocol for USB will be released, named USB 3.0. This new design will increase transfer speeds by up to ten times over the current USB 2.0 designs that have been in use for the last nine years.
USB 3.0 Design
The new USB 3.0 design takes advantage of two specific design improvements:
- Increase in transfer wires from 4 to 9, allowing for more information packets to be transferred in parallel
- More efficient data handling within the data bus, including the ability to specifically target individual devices rather than sending the same information to all USB ports like in current USB protocol
The new design is estimated to have top transfer speeds of 4.8 to 5 Gbits/sec, over the 480 Mbits/sec rate currently achievable with the USB 2.0 design.
Benefits of New USB 3.0 Design
The tenfold increase in speed that the new USB 3.0 design will provide over the existing USB 2.0 design opens up a variety of possibilities for data transfer. Data that is transferred from a portable device to a PC or laptop, such as photos from a digital camera, will take a tenth of the time to transfer.
Data can be streamed from a portable device, such as a flash drive, with crisp performance without having to transfer the file to the PC. Video can be streamed in HD quality without any performance loss. External hard drives will have dramatically improved performance in data retrieval.
The new USB hardware will be backwards compatible with existing USB hardware and cables, allowing for older USB components to be plugged into USB 3.0 ports, and USB 3.0 components plugged into older USB ports, although in both of these cases, the speed is limited to the lowest speed part used.
USB 3.0 - Coming Soon
USB 3.0 is not yet available, but manufacturers are planning to release USB 3.0 components later in 2009. These initial components will not have the peak performance that is possible with the USB 3.0 design, that will be achieved over the next few years as the protocol is optimized. NEC Electronics, one of the primary host controller manufacturers for the USB 3.0 protocol, predicts that the number of USB 3.0 PCs shipped will reach about 140 million PCs in 2011, and about 340 million PCs in 2012.
The USB 3.0 development will revolutionize data transfer and open up new possibilities for data streaming applications from and to portable devices.
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