You must be familiar with the USB (Universal Serial Bus) port that is easily available in any of PC platform nowadays. The usage of this interface are so common ranging from peripherals such as mouse, keyboard, thumb drive to more sophisticated devices such as Bluetooth, UWB (Ultra Wide Band) dongle, mobile phone charging and synchronization. Besides IEEE1394 FireWire, USB 2.0 host port is so far the most convenience and high speed wired port that is capable of supporting 480Mbps transfer speed. During the recent Intel Developer Forum, Intel has just announced the availability of USB 3.0 specification that will bring the transfer rate ten times faster that current USB 2.0 interface. The specification will be released in first half of year 2008.

    The USB port is famous for its easy usage and common device compatibility. Its easy plug and play feature has made it a great choice for both developers and consumers. Almost all current electronics devices available in the market come with some kind of USB interfaces such as USB Series A or Mini-B interfaces. While maintaining this plug and play feature, USB 3.0 is capable to bring up the transfer bandwidth up to 4.8Gbps which is about ten times faster than current USB 2.0 standard. Even current highest speed IEEE 1394 FireWire is only able to reach maximum of 800Mbps transfer rate.

    The USB 3.0 products are believed to be available in late 2009 or early 2010 for commercial use. Although not much application really needs that kind of bandwidth but some may predict that there will be new usage model that able to utilize this newly release specification in short future. The good thing is, it is backward compatible and hence there is no worry about your current USB 2.0 devices to be used in future PC platform.