Faster USB on track for introduction this year

Faster USB on track for introduction this year
By David Lammers, EE Times
February 18, 2000 (11:10 a.m. EST)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20000218S0010

PALM SPRINGS, Calif. — Version 2.0 of the Universal Serial Bus is on track for introduction by the Christmas 2000 selling season, according to Intel executives speaking at the Intel Developer Forum this week. The latest rev of the USB spec will support data-transfer rates of 480 Mbits/second for peripherals connected to a system.

In a keynote address here, Pat Gelsinger, general manager of the Intel desktop products group (Hillsborough, Ore.), demonstrated a USB 2.0 connection to a flatbed scanner, based on controller and transceiver ICs implemented in FPGAs.

Jason Ziller, a technology initiatives manager for Intel (Santa Clara, Calif.), said the 0.9 version of the USB 2.0 specification was released in December and will soon go out for a 30-day industry review. The final spec should be available on the USB Implementers Forum Web site in April.

USB 2.0 is about 40 times faster than the USB 1.1 specifica tion. With data rates of 60 Mbytes/s, transfers that previously took five minutes will take less than 10 seconds, Ziller said. The higher bandwidth will enable applications such as interactive games and digital image creation, and will be used in videoconferencing cameras, scanners, printers, external storage, and broadband Internet connections.

The 2.0 spec calls for the same cables and connectors used in the 1.1 standard, but the voltage swing in the controllers will be reduced from 3.3 volts in version 1.1 USB chip sets to 400 millivolts in version 2.0 chips. Also, dual termination is required on both ends of the wire, he said.