Super Speed USB 3.0 Specification is Finalized and Available to Developers

Previously we talked about the USB 3.0 Physical Connector Design and its initial USB 3.0 Specification with 4.8Gbps Transfer speed, now seems that the actual specification has been finalized and transitioned to USB-IF (USB Implementers Forum) for further publication to developers. This is definitely great news to all and hopefully able to end recent widespread rumors that Intel (one of the USB 3.0 promoters group besides Microsoft, NEC, HP, Texas Instruments and ST-NXP) was holding back the specifications from being released to other competitors such as AMD and NVIDIA in an attempt to gain competitiveness with faster Time-to-Market advantage.

The most obvious improvement as compared to its predecessor, USB 2.0 standard is definitely the maximum transfer speed that has been scaled up significantly with USB 3.0 theoretically transfer rate of 4.8Gbps, that makes it a better choice for developers to integrate into on new platform over IEEE 1394 Firewire or other legacy interfaces. Besides, USB 3.0 is claimed to have new internal power management function that can support suspend, idle and sleep states for better power savings.

As expected, the USB 3.0 will be backward compatible with current USB 2.0 compliant devices in the market. With the current specification release, all manufacturers are able to implement USB 3.0 compliant host ports on their next generation platforms now and we are looking forward for the actual USB 3.0 controller to be available by second half of 2009 followed by the first complete prototype ready by 2010.