At the Intel
Developer Forum, Intel announced that they and other companies are working on the USB 3.0 specification. This new technology will offer
speeds 10x that of USB 2.0 as well as lower power consumption and improved protocol efficiency.
Intel Corporation and
other industry leaders have formed the USB 3.0 Promoter Group to create a superspeed personal USB interconnect that can deliver over 10
times the speed of today's connection. The technology, also developed by HP, Microsoft Corporation, NEC Corporation, NXP Semiconductors
and Texas Instruments Incorporated, will target fast sync-and-go transfer applications in the PC, consumer and mobile segments that are
necessary as digital media become ubiquitous and file sizes increase up to and beyond 25 Gigabytes.
USB (Universal Serial Bus) 3.0
will create a backward-compatible standard with the same ease-of-use and plug and play capabilities of previous USB technologies.
Targeting over 10x performance increase, the technology will draw from the same architecture of wired USB. In addition, the USB 3.0
specification will be optimized for low power and improved protocol efficiency. USB 3.0 ports and cabling will be designed to enable
backward compatibility as well as future-proofing for optical capabilities.
A completed USB 3.0 specification is
expected by the first half of 2008. If you'd like to read more, Intel's entire press release can be found here.
