K.
Ajit Kumar
USB 3.0
The Innovation for the
Future Speed
What is USB?
USB refers to Universal Serial Bus.
Provides an expandable, fast, bi-directional, low
cost, hot pluggable Plug and Play serial hardware
interface.
Allows users to connect a wide variety of
peripherals to a computer and have them
automatically configured and ready to use.
Implemented to provide a replacement for legacy
ports to make the addition of peripheral devices
quick and easy for the end user.
History of USB
The USB 1.0 specification was introduced in January
1996 with a speed of 1.5Mbit/s.
The USB 2.0 specification was released in April 2000
with a data transfer rate of 480Mbit/s.
The specifications for USB 3.0 were released in
November 2008.The main goal is to increase the data
transfer rate to 5Gbps, decreased power consumption,
backward compatibility with the previous versions.
How Communication takes places in
USB?
USB device communication is based on pipes(Logic
Channels).
A pipe is a connection from the host controller to a
logical entity, found on a device, and named an
endpoint. These endpoints are addressed with ‘Tuple’
(device address, endpoint number).
While in USB 3.0, 16 byte SuperSpeed packets are
introduced. They contain Route String and Device
Address Triple(device address, endpoint
number,direction).
Key features of USB 3.0
Also referred to as SuperSpeed USB
Speeds 10x faster than 2.0
Transfer of 25 GB file in approx. 70 seconds
Optimized power efficiency
Lower active and idle power requirements
Backward compatible with USB 2.0
USB 2.0 device will work with USB 3.0 host
USB 3.0 device will work with USB 2.0 host
Architectural Overview of USB 3.0
USB 3.0 is a physical SuperSpeed bus combined in
parallel with a physical USB 2.0 bus. It has similar
architectural components as USB 2.0, namely
Non SuperSpeed Controller
USB 3.0 Interconnect
USB 3.0 Devices
USB 3.0 Host
The
USB 3.0 interconnect is the manner in which
USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 devices connect to
communicate with the USB 3.0 host.
Dual Bus architecture of USB 3.0
USB 3.0 Host includes a
SuperSpeed and non
SuperSpeed bus
interfaces, which are
parallel buses that may
be active simultaneously.
Upto 127 extended
connectors can be
connected to this host
while the previous
version support only 31.
Connections in USB
USB 3.0 Connections USB 2.0 Connections
The USB 3.0 has a total of 8 connectors which includes a pair of half-
duplex connectors as in the previous version and a pair of Dual-Simplex
transmitter and receiver for both the host and the end-point. The V BUS
and GND are same for both versions.
Types of Connectors
USB 2.0 Connectors USB 3.0 Connectors
Micro-B
For all USB 3.0 connectors, there will be five extra pins for the
SuperSpeed connections
Power for USB
The nominal 5 V ± 5% source (host or hub) is 4.75
V to 5.25 V.
A unit load is defined as 100 mA in USB 2.0, and
was raised to 150 mA in USB 3.0.
A maximum of 5 unit loads (500 mA) can be drawn
from a port in USB 2.0, which was raised to
6 (900 mA) in USB 3.0.
Comparing SuperSpeed with USB 2.0
Speed Comparision Chart
The above chart shows the speed vs time chart for the versions of USB.
APPLICATIONS
USB implements connections to storage devices using a
set of standards called the USB mass storage device
class.
USB 3.0 can also support portable hard disk drives. The
earlier versions of USBs were not supporting the 3.5
inch hard disk drives.
These external drives usually contain a translating
device that interfaces a drive of conventional technology
(IDE, PATA, SATA, ATAPI, or even SCSI) to a USB
port.
Why the upgrade?
Mainly the need for faster transfer rates
in devices such as hard drives, flash
card readers, and DVD, Blu-ray, and HD
DVD optical drives.
User applications demanding a higher
performance connection between the
PC and peripherals.
Need for greater energy efficiency in todays
‘greener world’.
Conclusion
The Universal serial bus 3.0 is supporting a speed
of about 5 Gb/sec i.e. ten times faster than the 2.0
version.
So hopefully by the help of this SuperSpeed data
transfer rate the USB 3.0 will be replacing many
of the connecters in the future
