New speeds and standards announced
Today, USB 3.2 devices have come into their own with transfer speeds of a staggering 20Gbps, twice as fast as USB 3.1 Gen 2. USB 3.2 was announced in 2017 with speeds of up to 20Gbps, twice as fast as USB 3.1 Gen 2. While USB 3.1 Gen. 2 has been well received and its 10Gbps bandwidth is more than enough to handle most demands, the advancement of technology never ends. The next generation of USB 3.2 standard was announced at the end of September 2017 alone.
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Device demonstrations and technical details
And now, for the first time, we have a public demonstration of a USB 3.2 device from Synopsys. The demonstration is based on the HAPS-80 FPGA hardware prototyping platform, which uses an advanced FinFET process to manufacture the USB PHY physical layer, providing 10Gbps bandwidth for each channel, and the dual-channel even realizes a high-speed transmission of 20Gbps, which is a doubling of the growth compared to USB 3.1 Gen.2.
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HAPS Platform Demo and Potential
HAPS Platform Technical Details and Demonstration
The HAPS platform is connected to a Linux PC via a PCI-E bus, and the device is set up as a mass storage device, such as a USB 3.2 SSD or USB 3.2 USB flash drive. To reduce latency, the platform utilizes a small amount of RAM on the FPGA as memory. On the host side, HAPS is connected to a Windows PC via a PCI-E cable, and the FPGA motherboard is plugged into the PC as a USB 3.2 xHCI host expansion card, with the system running standard Windows drivers. In this demonstration, the HAPS platform is connected to a Linux or Windows system via the PCI-E bus, demonstrating USB 3.2 performance.
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The Potential and Popularity of USB3.2
In the demo, the HAPS platform demonstrated a speed of 1.6GB/s, which is only about 2/3 of its standard limit, implying that the platform still holds great potential. With the advent of the USB 3.2 era, the Type-C interface is gradually becoming the industry standard for its convenience, flexibility and power. However, just like the previous standard upgrades, it will take time for USB 3.2 to become more widespread. We expect to see the first devices supporting this standard next year.
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Type-C and the Future of Interfaces
Advantages and popularity of Type-C interface
It is worth noting that although Intel and AMD have only begun to natively support USB 3.1 Gen.2 in the past two years, the full integration of USB 3.2 into the platform will be much slower. In the early stages, third-party host chips will still play an important role in this area. the Type-C interface has convenient and powerful features, and is gradually becoming a standard to drive the future trend of unified interfaces.
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Future device and interface colors
Personally, I speculate that the widespread popularization of USB3.2 will need to wait until at least next year. Currently, most USB3.X devices on the market are still at the USB3.0 technology stage, and it is challenging to find devices that support USB3.1 Gen2. It had been envisioned that USB 2.0 would use a black interface, USB 3.0 would use a blue interface, and USB 3.1 would use a red interface, but we have no way of knowing the color of the USB 3.2 interface at this time. With the popularity of Type-C, there may be no need to distinguish interface colors in the future, but there is still a need to solve the problem of identification.
