2001 Ad

Electronic News, March 26, 2001 by Jason Ziller

AT THE RECENT INTEL DeveloperForum (IDF) in Silicon Valley, the USB Implementers Forum hosted a pavilion where well over a dozen USE 2.0, or HiSpeed USB, products gearing up for market introduction were displayed and demonstrated. These included host add-in cards and PC Cards, hubs and devices. The peripherals included scanners and storage devices such as hard drives, CD/RW, DVD and magneto-optical (MO) drives, and flash-card readers.

Traffic in the pavilion was extremely high, with a lot of interest and questions about Hi-Speed USB and the new USB logo. Many of the questions were asked repeatedly, so Lam devoting this article to addressing these most commonly asked questions.

Question 1: When do you expect to see the first USE 2.0 host adapters and peripherals shipping?

The first USB 2.0 (dubbed Hi-Speed USE for consumers) products are expected to start shipping within months. Several companies have already announced that they expect to ship products starting in April. Dozens of products are expected to be in the marketplace by the back-to-school sales season, which begins in the June/July timeframe.

Question 2: What are some of the first types of products that will be shipping?

Many of the devices that were shown in the USB-IF booth at IDF are various types of storage, such as hard drives, CD/RW, DVD and MO drives, and flash card readers. Scanners were also present in the booth, with three different vendors each showing their own. We also expect to start seeing demonstrations of printers, cameras, and even Ethernet adapters very soon.

Question 3: What is the performance of these devices?

Hi-Speed USB, with a bus bandwidth of 480Mbit/sec., has more bandwidth than most peripherals in the marketplace need. Therefore, we would expect to see that peripherals will no longer have their performance limited by the bus, instead the limit will be the peripheral itself. Some early performance data that was shown in the USE 2.0 technical session at IDF shows this to be true. For example, a couple of different hard drives and CD/RW drives were measured with the IDE-to-USB 2.0 bridge compared to their native IDE. According to hard drive benchmarks, the USE 2.0 hard drives typically achieved about 90 to 95 percent of the performance of the same hard drive on its native IDE. CD/RW and other storage devices typically performed about the same on USB 2.0 and native IDE. When compared to their performance when running with USB 1.1 (12Mbit/sec.), these storage devices showed significant improvement when using USB 2.0. For example, hard drives have been seen performing 10 times to 15 times faster on USB 2.0 than o n USB 1.1. Reading or burning an audio CD proved to be about 5 times faster on USE 2.0--cutting down the time for writing a CD from 24 minutes on USB 1.1 to only four minutes on USB 2.0.

Question 4: Do these devices run on existing PCs with USB 1.1 ports?

Since Hi-Speed USB is fully backward- and forward-compatible with the original USB, Hi-Speed USE devices will run on the huge installed base of USE 1.1equipped PCs (at 12Mbit/sec.). This is a tremendous benefit to consumers and IT managers alike, as they can share Hi-Speed USB devices across their entire base of USE 1.1- and 2.0-equipped PCs.

Question 5: How can I upgrade my existing PC with USB 2.0?

Host adapter add-in cards should start shipping in the marketplace soon. These will allow a typical PC with a PCI add-in card slot to support Hi-Speed USB. PC cards for notebooks are also expected to start shipping sometime in the second quarter of this year.

Question 6: Why is there a new USE logo? When will I see it on products in retail stores?

The USB Implementers Forum has introduced a new logo for use on USB-device packaging and collaterals. The license to use the logo requires that the product pass USE-IF compliance testing. Therefore, PC OEMs, retailers, and consumers should look for the logo when buying quality USE devices. Products are already starting to show up in retail with the new logo, such as some scanners recently announced by Hewlett Packard Co.

Further information, including postings of the most recent product and technology announcements, is available at the USE Implementers Forum website at www.usb.org

Jason Ziller is chairman of the USB Implementers Forum and a technology initiatives manager at Intel Corp. The USB Connection appears monthly in Electronic News.