Universal Serial Bus (USB) provides a serial bus standard for connecting devices, usually to a computer, but it also is in use on other devices such as set-top boxes, game consoles and PDAs. (wikipedia.org) About USB
USB, short form for Universal Serial Bus, was invented
by Ajay Bhatt and his team, which included engineers from Compaq, DEC, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, NEC and Nortel in January of 1996. It is a type of asynchronous serial data transmission method. USB has now, become the standard method of transferring data between a computer and a number of devices. HARDWARE COMPONENT OF USB HOW IS DATA SENT ACROSS THE USB When the software requires data transfer to occur between itself and the USB, it sends a block of data called an I/O Request Packet (IRP) to the appropriate pipe, and the software is later notified when this request is completed successfully or terminated by error. As suggested by the name Universal Serial Bus, data transmission in the bus occurs in a serial form. Bytes of data are broken up and sent along the bus one bit at a time, with the least significant bit first.
Pipe- logic communication between client and software on the host
and the function on the device is done through pipes. Its an association between a specific endpoint on the device and the appropriate software in the host Continued
The actual data is sent across the bus in packets. Each
packet is a bundle of data along with information concerning the source, destination and length of the data, and also error detection information. Each of these packets should be the maximum possible size except for the final packet. The USB host has a built in mechanism so that the software can tell it when to expect full sized packets. Errors are detected by the use of CRCs(Cyclic Redundancy Checks). A little about transfer and transaction
The transfer is the process of making a communications request with an
endpoint.
Transfers determine aspects of the communications flow such as:
Data format imposed by the USB Direction of communication flow Packet size constraints Bus access constraints Latency constraints Required data sequences Error Handling
A transfer has one or more
transactions which then has one, two or three packets ADVANTAGES OF USB
Before, USBs were invented, different devices had
different types of cables which werent interchangeable, therefore making the transfer of data a fuss. Normal computers had only 2 serial ports and 1 parallel port which was really slow. Therefore a device like USB was required which was universal, multi functional, hot- swappable and had fast data transfer rate. ADVANCEMENTS IN USB TECHNOLOGY
Also referred to as SuperSpeed USB
Speeds 10x faster than 2.0 (5 Gbps in controlled test environment) Transfer of 25 GB file in approx 70 seconds (see chart)
Backward compatible with USB 2.0
USB 2.0 device will work with USB 3.0 host USB 3.0 device will work with USB 2.0 host THE END