The Universal Serial Bus (USB), with one billion units in the installed base, is the most successful interface in PC history. Projections are for 3.5 billion interfaces shipped by 2006. Benefiting from exceptionally strong industry support from all market segments, USB continues to evolve as new technologies and products come to market. It is already the de facto interconnect for PCs, and has proliferated into consumer electronics (CE) and mobile devices as well.

The Wireless USB is the first the high speed Personal Wireless Interconnect. Wireless USB will build on the success of wired USB, bringing USB technology into the wireless future. Usage will be targeted at PCs and PC peripherals, consumer electronics and mobile devices. To maintain the same usage and architecture as wired USB, the Wireless USB specification is being defined as a high-speed host-to-device connection. This will enable an easy migration path for today’s wired USB solutions.

There are many new features included in the new Universal Serial Bus Specification. The most important one is the super speed data transfer itself. Then the USB 3.0 can support more devices than the currently using specification which is USB 2.0. The bus power spec has been increased so that a unit load is 150mA (+50% over minimum using USB 2.0). An unconfigured device can still draw only 1 unit load, but a configured device can draw up to 6 unit loads (900mA, an 80% increase over USB 2.0 at a registered maximum of 500mA). Minimum device operating voltage is dropped from 4.4V to 4V. When operating in SuperSpeed mode, full-duplex signaling occurs over 2 differential pairs separate from the non-SuperSpeed differential pair.