USB 3.0:The nxt gen universal serial bus

When you're in front of your PC, waiting for something to transfer to removable media, that's when seconds feel like minutes, and minutes feel like hours. And data storage scenarios such as that one is where the new SuperSpeed USB 3.0's greatest impact will be felt first.

The USB 3.0 Promoter Group announced on November 17, 2008, that version 3.0 of the specification had been completed and had made the transition to the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF), the managing body of USB specifications. This move effectively opened the specification to hardware developers for implementation in future products. The first certified USB 3.0 consumer products were announced January 5, 2010, at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show (CES), including two motherboards by ASUS and Gigabyte Technology.

Whats in USB 3.0 ?

The beauty of USB 3.0 is its backward compatibility with USB 2.0; you need a new cable and new host adapter (or, one of the Asus or Gigabyte motherboards that supports USB 3.0) to achieve USB 3.0, but you can still use the device on a USB 2.0 port and achieve typical USB 2.0 performance. In reducing some overhead requirements of USB (now, the interface only transmits data to the link and device that need it, so devices can go into low power state when not needed), the new incarnation now uses one-third the power of USB 2.0.
The theoretical throughput improvement offered by USB 3.0 is dramatic -- a theoretical 10X jump over existing USB 2.0 hardware. USB 2.0 maxed out at a theoretical 480Mbps, while USB 3.0 can theoretically handle up to 5Gbps. Mind you, applications like storage will still be limited by the type of drive inside; so, for example, you can expect better performance from RAIDed hard drives or fast solid-state drives (SSDs) than from, say, a standalone single drive connected to the computer via USB 3.0.
The real-world examples are fairly convincing -- and underscore USB 3.0's advantage for high-def video, music, and digital imaging applications. Our early test results are encouraging as well: We tested Western Digital's My Book 3.0, the first USB 3.0-certified external hard drive. The performance was on a par with that of eSATA-but the benefit here is that USB 3.0 is a powered port, so you don't need to have another external power supply running to the drive (as you do with eSATA; unless the eSATA drive you're using is designed to steal power from a USB port while transferring data over the eSATA interface).
A new feature is the "SuperSpeed" bus, which provides a fourth transfer mode at 5.0 Gbit/s. The raw throughput is 4 Gbit/s, and the specification considers it reasonable to achieve 3.2 Gbit/s (0.4 Gbyte/s or 400 MByte/s), or more, after protocol overhead.
When operating in SuperSpeed mode, full-duplex signaling occurs over two differential pairs separate from the non-SuperSpeed differential pair. This results in USB 3.0 cables containing two wires for power and ground, two wires for non-SuperSpeed data, and four wires for SuperSpeed data, and a shield that was not required in previous specifications.
To accommodate the additional pins for SuperSpeed mode, the physical form factors for USB 3.0 plugs and receptacles have been modified from those used in previous versions. Standard-A cables have extended heads where the SuperSpeed connectors extend beyond and slightly above the legacy connectors. Similarly, the Standard-A receptacle is deeper to accept these new connectors. On the other end, the SuperSpeed Standard-B connectors are placed on top of the existing form factor. A legacy standard A-to-B cable will work as designed and will never contact any of the SuperSpeed connectors, ensuring backward compatibility. SuperSpeed standard A plugs will fit legacy A receptacles, but SuperSpeed standard B plugs will not fit into legacy standard B receptacles, so a new cable can be used to connect a new device to an old host, but not to connect a new host to an old device; for that, a legacy standard A-to-B cable will be required.
SuperSpeed establishes a communications pipe between the host and each device, in a host-directed protocol. In contrast, USB 2.0 broadcasts packet traffic to all devices.
USB 3.0 extends the bulk transfer type in SuperSpeed with Streams. This extension allows a host and device to create and transfer multiple streams of data through a single bulk pipe.
New power management features include support of idle, sleep and suspend states, as well as link-, device-, and function-level power management.
The bus power spec has been increased so that a unit load is 150 mA (+50% over minimum using USB 2.0). An unconfigured device can still draw only one unit load, but a configured device can draw up to six unit loads (900 mA, an 80% increase over USB 2.0 at a registered maximum of 500 mA). Minimum device operating voltage is dropped from 4.4 V to 4 V.
USB 3.0 does not define cable assembly lengths, except that it can be of any length as long as it meets all the requirements defined in the specification. Although electronicdesign.com estimated cables will be limited to 3 m at SuperSpeed, cables which support SuperSpeed are already available up to 5 m in length.
The technology is similar to a single channel ("1×") of PCI Express 2.0 (5 Gbit/s). It uses 8B/10B encoding, linear feedback shift register (LFSR) scrambling for data and spread spectrum. It forces receivers to use low frequency periodic signaling (LFPS), dynamic equalization, and training sequences to ensure fast signal locking.

 When its coming...?
Consumer products became available in January 2010. To ensure compatibility between motherboards and peripherals, all USB-certified devices must be approved by the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF). At least one complete end-to-end test system for USB 3.0 designers is on the market.
On January 5, 2010, USB-IF announced the first two certified USB 3.0 motherboards, one by Asus and one by Gigabyte.Previous announcements included Gigabyte's October 2009 list of seven P55 chipset USB 3.0 motherboards, and an ASUS motherboard that was cancelled before production.
Commercial controllers are expected to enter into volume production in the first quarter of 2010. On September 24, 2009 Freecom announced a USB 3.0 external hard drive.On January 4, 2010, Seagate announced a small portable HDD with PC Card targeted for laptops (or desktop with PC Card slot addition) at the CES in Las Vegas.
Drivers are under development for Windows 7, but support was not included with the initial release of the operating system. However, drivers are available for Windows through manufacturer websites. The Linux kernel has supported USB 3.0 since version 2.6.31, which was released in September 2009.
Intel will not support USB 3.0 until 2011,which will slow down mainstream adoption. These delays may be due to problems in the CMOS manufacturing process,a focus to advance the Nehalem platform, a wait to mature all the 3.0 connections standards (USB3, PCIe3, SATA3.0) before developing a new chip set, or a tactic by Intel to boost its upcoming Light Peak interface.Current AMD roadmaps indicate that the new southbridges released in the beginning of 2010 will not support USB 3.0.Market researcher In-Stat predicts a relevant market share of USB 3.0 not until 2011.

so it will be exciting to see whether USB 3.0 becomes as popular as its older generation.....well its has all the fire powers to do so.....

MEMRISTOR: The fourth component of the electrical circuit...

Researchers at Hewlett-Packard have developed a working unit of a memory circuit that has existed in theory for 37 years, which could ultimately replace RAM and make computers more intelligent by tracking data it has retained.
The technology, called memristor, could allow computers to make decisions by understanding past patterns of data it has collected, similar to human brains collecting and understanding a series of events.
For example, a memristor circuit could be capable of telling a microwave the heating time for different food types based on the information it has collected over time, said Stanley Williams, senior fellow at HP.
A memristor circuit requires lower voltage and less time to turn on than competitive memory like DRAM and flash, Williams said. "Because it [uses] less voltage and less time, of course, it uses much less power," Williams said. Denser cells also allow memristor circuits to store more data than flash memory.
Through prototypes, HP is trying to show circuit designers what memristor is capable of doing. "What we have done is confirmed a concept for a new electronic device that was originally proposed nearly 40 years ago," Williams said.
Memristor is the fourth fundamental circuit element, joining the other three -- resistor, capacitor and inductor -- that had been known for 150 years, Williams said. The element has properties that cannot be duplicated by any combination of the other three elements, Williams said.
"It is as fundamental to electronic engineering as a chemical element is to chemistry or an electron is to physics," Williams said.
In a 1971 academic paper, Leon Chua, a mathematician and professor at the University of California at Berkeley, wrote that memristor would have properties similar to a synapse in a brain. The synapse makes connections between two neurons, and the more often a signal is sent to a synapse, the stronger the synapse gets.
"That is a very different type of behavior than anything that had been observed before in circuit elements," Williams said.
HP is not going to reproduce all the functions of a brain in memristor, but the company is trying to build a relatively simple computing machine that operates on a different principle from today's computers, Williams said.
The scientists created the memory by applying a charge on a circuit with blocks of titanium dioxide. The actual resistance of the memristor changes depending on the amount of current flowing through the circuit, Williams said. When the current is turned off, the memory retains the information it has acquired.
Although the concept of memristor has existed for a while, the memory prototype is an academic device that will first work its way to academia. It could hit the commercial semiconductor market in five years, Williams said.

what is memristor...?
A memristor is a passive two-terminal circuit element in which the resistance is a function of the time history of the current and voltage through the device. Memristor theory was formulated and named by Leon chu in a 1971 paper.On April 30, 2008 a team at HP Labs announced the development of a switching memristor. Based on a thin film of titanium dioxide, it has a regime of operation with an approximately linear charge-resistance relationship.These devices are being developed for application in nanoelectric memories, computer logic, and nueromorphic computer architecture.

Background

Memristor symbol.

A memristor is a passive two-terminal electronic component for which the resistance (dV/dI) is proportional to the amount of charge that has flowed through the circuit. When current flows in one direction through the device, the resistance increases; and when current flows in the opposite direction, the resistance decreases. When the current is stopped, the component retains the last resistance that it had, and when the flow of charge starts again, the resistance of the circuit will be what it was when it was last active.
More generally, a memristor is a two-terminal component in which the resistance depends on the integral of the input applied to the terminals, rather than on the instantaneous value of the input at the terminals. Since the element "remembers" the amount of current that has passed through it in the past, it was tagged by Chua with the name "memristor." A general memristor is any of various kinds of passive two-terminal circuit elements that maintain a functional relationship between the time integrals of current and voltage. This function, called memristance, is similar to variable resistance. Specifically engineered memristors provide controllable resistance, but such devices are not commercially available. Other devices such as batteries and varistors have memristance, but it does not normally dominate their behavior. The definition of the memristor is based solely on fundamental circuit variables, similar to the resistor, capacitor, and inductor. Unlike those three elements, which are allowed in linear time-invariant or LTI system theory, memristors are nonlinear and may be described by any of a variety of time-varying functions of net charge. There is no such thing as a generic memristor. Instead, each device implements a particular function, wherein either the integral of voltage determines the integral of current, or vice versa. A linear time-invariant memristor is simply a conventional resistor.
In his 1971 paper, memristor theory was formulated and named by Leon Chua,extrapolating the conceptual symmetry between the resistor, inductor, and capacitor, and inferring that the memristor is a similarly fundamental device. Other scientists had already proposed fixed nonlinear flux-charge relationships, but Chua's theory introduced generality.
Like other two-terminal components (e.g., resistor, capacitor, inductor), real-world devices are never purely memristors ("ideal memristor"), but will also exhibit some amount of capacitance, resistance, and inductance.

Potential applications

Williams' solid-state memristors
They can also be fashioned into non-volatile solid-state memory, which would allow greater data density than hard drives with access times potentially similar to DRAM, replacing both components.HP prototyped a crossbar latch memory using the devices that can fit 100 gigabits in a square centimeter, and has designed a highly scalable 3D design (consisting of up to 1000 layers or 1 petabit per cm³).HP has reported that its version of the memristor is currently about one-tenth the speed of DRAM.The devices' resistance would be read with aternating current so that the stored value would not be affected.
Some patents related to memristors appear to include applications in programmable logic,signal processing,neural networks,and control systems.
Recently, a simple electronic circuit consisting of an LC network and a memristor was used to model experiments on adaptive behavior of unicellular organisms.It was shown that the electronic circuit subjected to a train of periodic pulses learns and anticipates the next pulse to come, similarly to the behavior of slime molds Physarum polycephalum subjected to periodic changes of environment.Such a learning circuit may find applications, e.g., in pattern recognition.

This technology can change the way we see the future and make our life easy by making fast and intelligent computers which will help to solve major research problems and help to generate newer technologies......