USB 3.0 Arrives!

10 times faster than USB 2.0
THE USB Implementers Forum will formally announce the technical specifications of the next generation of Universal Serial Bus connectivity at a conference in San Jose, California, next week.

Despite a difficult birth – hampered by infighting and political shenanigans between the big players, including Intel Nvidia and AMD – the new standard is expected to be something in the order of ten times faster than the current USB 2.0 specification.

Everything USB is reporting that a 25GB file can be transferred in just 70 seconds using the new system, compared to nearly 14 minutes for USB 2.0 and a pitifully slow (how did we ever cope?) 9.3 hours for 1.0.

That's 4.8Gb a second. Other improvements will include better power management and the use of optical cabling. Wowie!

The technology is similar to PCI Express 2.0 (5-Gbit/s). It uses 8B10B encoding, linear feedback shift register (LFSR) scrambling for data, spread spectrum. It forces receivers to use lowfrequency periodic signaling (LFPS), dynamic equalization, and training sequences to ensure fast signal locking.

The connector will be divided into two parts. The first part is the USB 2.0 four-wire version with UTP data pair and power with ground. The second part will have five connections: two UTP lane (one is uplink and one is downlink) and a ground. An optical connector and cable will be available in the future.