Intel Corporation and other industry leaders have formed the USB 3.0 Promoter Group to create a superspeed personal USB interconnect that can deliver over 10 times the speed of today’s 2.0 connection ( by adding fiber-optic links alongside the traditional copper wires) .The current USB 2.0 version has a top data-transfer rate of 480 megabits per second, so a tenfold increase would be 4.8 gigabits per second.
The technology, also developed by HP, Microsoft Corporation, NEC Corporation, NXP Semiconductors and Texas Instruments Incorporated, will target fast sync-and-go transfer applications in the PC, consumer and mobile segments that are necessary as digital media become ubiquitous and single file sizes increase up to and beyond 25 Gigabytes.
A completed USB 3.0 specification is expected by the first half of 2008
