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To: DiViT who wrote (29443)	2/13/1998 9:25:00 AM
From: BillyG	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50808

USB being upgraded for robust 12Mbit/sec connections, other features........... techweb.cmp.com Posted: 9:00 p.m. EST, 2/11/98 Drafters prepare 'cleaned up' spec for USB By Rick Boyd-Merritt NEW YORK -- The Universal Serial Bus is about to get a spring cleaning. A USB 1.1 specification is in the works, aimed at making this 12-Mbit-per-second connection for computer and consumer-electronic devices more robust and mature. "It's basically a cleaning up of the spec, avoiding ambiguity and clarifying some things which might be subject to interpretation," said Steve Whalley, chairman of the USB Implementers Forum and a program manager for USB at Intel Corp. The first draft of USB 1.1 is out now to members of the ad hoc consortium of companies responsible for developing the spec. Members include Compaq, Digital Equipment, IBM, Intel, Microsoft and Nortel. Details of the new spec may be discussed at the Intel Developers Forum Feb. 17, though a full release will not be ready until midyear. Developers had originally hoped their work would be ready for release at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference in April. After the expected June release, silicon makers will have 12 months to comply with the new spec. Any existing USB device would still be compatible with USB 1.1 devices, and developers expect host controllers to only require new software drivers to support the standard, although the spec contains new recommendations for host controllers. USB hub chips, however, will have to go through a silicon revision to be 1.1-compatible. "There's a substantial rewrite of the chapter on USB hubs," said one developer of the spec who asked not to be named. "A lot of issues are in areas such as power management, tighter timings to speed up the process of enumerating devices on the bus, and defining more boundary conditions. There is also some elimination of work done in hub hardware that can now be pushed to the software stack." In the power-management area, USB 1.1 tries to address the many kinds of system "wake up" events that a device may encounter. To address this issue, some suspend and resume modes have been changed. Another part of the spec is a new "interrupt out" feature that allows a host controller to send occasional data to a USB device with a guarantee that the data will be delivered in a bounded amount of time. The feature serves a set of devices-such as joysticks that offer force feedback-that don't require multimedia streaming but do have occasional priority demands. Much of the new spec addresses ways to eliminate relatively rare error conditions or multiple error conditions that might occur simultaneously. "We have not run into any situations where the bus doesn't do what people want it to do, but we have seen some boundary conditions where the spec doesn't guarantee everything will work as it should in some worst-case scenarios," said the USB developer. "The number of times all these error conditions will cascade at once is very rare, but we want to deal with them as part of making the bus more robust and mature." This marks the first revision of the USB spec since it was rolled out at Comdex/Fall in 1995 and formally ratified in January 1996. Given that the bus is just now hitting its stride in acceptance, developers are keen to ensure USB 1.1 offers full backward compatibility. Dataquest estimates as many as 37 million USB connections shipped in 1997, representing as much as a 50 percent penetration rate on desktop PCs. It forecasts that 99 million USB-enabled devices could ship this year. "With things like USB, we are trying to get off the incremental-upgrade treadmill that PCs have been on and not force engineers to go back and reinvent a bus every 18 months," said the USB developer. "The goal is we don't break anything that is out there."