USB 3.0

As I mentioned in a previous blog, I was in the Silicon Valley last week. I Love being out there, not for the technology, but the food. The food is awesome! Around every corner is a great place to eat. There is a great Thai food place called A-Marin (they don’t serve beer, but the food more then makes up for it) it was there I met up with an old pal of mine. He has been working with Universal Serial Bus technologies longer then Madonna has been a skank. After trading the; How’s the kids,cars,job,wife and new Star Trek movie trailer mandatory info we got down to the good stuff. Geekin. I went straight for the bit juggler and ask about how real USB3 speeds are. Where does reality end and marketing begin? We talking along time about the measurement devices and processes for testing USB3 speed. After talking about the details, USB3 really is alot like PCI-e 2.0. Including the use of 8b/10b encoding which I do not understand since this will add at 20% overhead. Like PCI-e 2.0 USB3 is tough to measure because it has a fast rise time and must be measured at the receiver with a 12.5 GHz o’scope. I wonder if I can expense one of those…(Hideo?) We went to his development lab and I got to play around with USB3. I was amazed at how large a diameter the cable was. It is about the size of an Cat5e cable. After I cut one open, (I’m sure that was OK…) I noticed more and thicker wires. This is because to achieve the speeds; I must transfer this data bidirectionally. After hours of playing around with USB3 I noticed some very cool things: – Man is it FAST! 4.8GB fast!! We transferred 40GB of data in 104 seconds! On USB 2.0 we transferred the same data in 22 minutes. USB3 is warp speed fast baby!! (Without breaking the laws of physics) – It is backward compatible – Power output has jumped from 100mA to a whoppin’ 900mA! Wholly smokes we can now power some big stuff with USB3!! Like my Han Solo in Carbonite Merry Christmas Desktop Statue! – Greener. I was happy about the power boost but in today’s network we are looking to be more power efficient. The groovy thing about USB3 is they eliminated that annoying polling method and have went to an interrupt driven model were the actual devices signal the host. When I ask the time to market on this stuff, I was told the initial standard was completed this November(!) but products should start hitting the market in 2010. I was bummed because I needed a new external USB drive to load my Star Trek classic episodes on… I was amazed at the advances and vast improvements made to the latest version of USB while still retaining the its backward capability. USB is a Verilog coders nightmare. It is complex with many exceptions and a bigger pain to test then having your boss see you at a Colts game when you called in sick. USB developers have always had my highest respects but now they are approaching Star Trek levels… Trivia File Transfer Protocol The only original manuscript of Beowulf was big time fire damaged in 1731. It was stored at a house called; “Ashburnham House” Just goes to show ya, good irony kinda writes itself. Jimmy Ray Purser