USB 3.0 – Everything you need to know this Super Speed interface

The world moves at an incredible speed. The list of technology advances in the first decade of 21st century is endless, and have offered great leaps forward for mankind. Where technological evolution is concerned, the “Universal” Serial Bus is the next big thing, because as the name suggests, its universal application is undeniable. So when a major feature upgrade comes up for such tech, it truly stirs the world.

Features overview of USB 3.0:

• A new enhanced “SuperSpeed” data mode with 4.8Gbps raw transfer rate (nearly 10 times as fast as Hi-Speed USB 2.0)

• It operates in full-duplex mode through the addition of four extra pairs of connections
• Completely backward compatible with USB 2.0 – even with the changes in cabling, the plug and the receptacles will support this feature
• Instead of broadcasting a device’s packet traffic to all other devices below the connecting host (like USB 2.0 does) it uses dedicated pipelining to each of the devices connected to the host system
• A single bulk transfer pipe can manage multiple streams of data, in SuperSpeed streaming mode
• An advanced power management feature that provides supports for power consumption as per a device’s demand; with sleep-mode
• The voltage consumption is now 4V, down from 4.4V of USB 2.0, but the electric current limit is now significantly increased by 80% to 900mA, to produce 4.5W at maximum power utilization

• A longer connector cable length will be supported. Although some speculate that at SuperSpeed mode, the cable length will have to be limited to 3 metres (comparable to eSATA)
• PCIe 2.0 Architecture has been followed, and the signaling, encoding, equalization of data etc. are implemented the same way.