USB Updates at IDF 2013
September 12, 2013, Intel Developer forum, San Francisco—Jeff Ravencraft from the USB Implementers Forum noted a number of organizational achievements and updates on specifications. The product association is getting good growth and support in the electronics industries.
The association noted over a thousand certified products for SuperSpeed USB in the market, up from 500 last year. New product categories include 3.0 hubs and power delivery products. Certifications continue to grow and the group expects to see 700M USB 3.0 products to ship this year. The higher speeds available through version 3.0 enable the interface to be used for many more applications from audio to video and 4k displays.
The interface is becoming media agnostic through the advent of wireless connectivity. The specification is designed to allow wireless devices and docking stations to communicate over the USB protocol, without the need for a physical USB connection. An important design goal of the specification is to achieve wireless gigabit transfer rates while leveraging existing USB infrastructure, present in the form of:
Open application programming interfaces in every major operating system
USB class specifications by USB-IF device working groups
A wealth of open-source/OS specific drivers for USB classes
Vendor-specific device drivers for a multitude of USB vendor-specific devices
Recent alignments with the WiGig group has resulted in the WiGig Serial Extension (WSE) v1.2 specification from the Wi-Fi Alliance providing the initial foundation for the Media Agnostic USB specification. The WSE specification has been formally transferred to the USB-IF from the Wi-Fi Alliance, and the WSE specification already incorporates the USB protocol.
The USB 3.0 Promoter Group today announced the completion of the USB 3.1 Specification which adds enhancements to enable SuperSpeed USB to operate at up to 10Gbps. This latest release of the specification is available for download from the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF) website. SuperSpeed USB10 Gbps uses a more efficient data encoding and will deliver more than twice the effective data through-put performance of existing SuperSpeed USB over enhanced, fully backward compatible USB connectors and cables. Compatibility is assured with existing USB 3.0 software stacks and device class protocols as well as with existing 5Gbps hubs and devices and USB 2.0 products.
Recently announced USB technology developments will continue to enhance user
experience across multiple computing platforms. The new USB 3.1 specification enables
SuperSpeed USB to operate at up to 10Gbps , a 2x performance increase from USB 3.0. Member companies are also currently implementing the recently released USB Power Delivery specification. USB Power Delivery provides consumers with a single USB cable, for A/V, data and power delivery up to 100watts. New products will have USB Power Delivery hardware inside and use a power delivery-enabled cable.
Each specification will be backward compatible with existing USB cables and connectors.
For more details, go to their website www.usb.org
