Here’s some lost footage, I’ve just found from my visit to CES 2013 with DisplayLink.

John points to ASUS, Lenovo, and HP Docking stations using the DisplayLink chip.  Most interesting, John Cummins, VP of Marketing, demonstrates the Dell Monitor with a Built In Docking Station used with a Tablet towards the end of this video.  (Couldn’t we do the same thing with a SmartPhone?)

There is another demo in the middle of the video that I’m not writing about at this time. I think it might be the first actual published video of this concept.  Watch the video to find out.  It’s not an insignificant demonstration.

That’s just a picture: the Video should be embedded below.

If the video isn’t properly embedded, then you need to go to YouTube here to view the DisplayLink CES 2013 video.

The great thing about DisplayLink is their customers keep coming out with more and more great products.

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Captioning by YouTube

Here are the captions that YouTube provided for this video.  You can see exactly how accurate they are.

 

I’m proud to report Synopsys is the first and only company to demonstrate a real USB 3.0 Host and USB 3.0 Device working with a real MIPI M-PHY and not only demonstrating traffic, but demonstrating how we can pass the tests run by the standard USB Compliance Verifier (USBCV) 3.0.

Before we begin, remember that SSIC is USB 3.0 SuperSpeed InterChip.  It allows for the use of USB 3.0 inside the box, and on the circuit board.  Not external physical connectors.  All on PCB using FR4 traces of up to 10cm long.   SSIC uses a MIPI M-PHY so the power consumption is between 40-80% lower than a standard USB 3.0 PHY while still providing a throughput
The USBCV tests are used to test USB 3.0 Hosts and Peripherals for compliance.

In our setup, we use the HAPS51-2 with a MIPI M-PHY on a daughter card for both the USB 3.0 Host and Device implementations.  Each is connected to a standard PC.

Our USB 3.0 Host PC, we run Windows 7 with a MCCI USB 3.0 Host drive.

On our USB 3.0 Device, the PC uses a Linux driver.  The Device is, like all of our other demos, a USB Mass Storage Device. (Basically a giant USB flash drive)

The connection between the two systems is only 4 co-ax cables running from the M-PHY on one platform to the other platform.  Since SSIC is really for on PCB or for modules.

A future video will explain this setup in detail.

Watch the video below to understand more below.

As with our first, original demo back in April 2012, we use unmodified USB 3.0 Device Firmware and USB 3.0 Host drivers.

And for fun, go back to this blog and review the original demonstration of our USB 3.0 Host and Device SSIC Proof of Concept Demonstration back in April 2012.  This was the one we used to help the USB-IF clarify the specification

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USB University

Remember to check out USB University.  It’s appropriate for managers and marketers working on or considering USB 3.0, and for architects and engineers that need deep technical detail.

I wanted to say this was the first demonstration of USB 3.0 SSIC with a MIPI M-PHY in the Universe, but I was overruled by a sense of conservatism.  (It probably is the first)

Here’s Hezi Saar, our MIPI M-PHY guy and I getting ready for our video shoot.

I’m not sure why he is smiling.  Check out his Blog OnTheMove for more on SSIC and MIPI.

Note that Hezi’s Gear 1, Gear 2 and Gear 3 M-PHY supports Gear 1, Gear 2, and Gear 3 speeds.

SSIC will be used in WiFi, LTE, WiGig / 60 GHz designs to connect to Mobile Applications Processors

As we enter the next era of USB, the 10 Gbps one, I’m asked constantly, why does USB need to go any faster?

Answer:  Users expect Instant On, fast access to everything.  This means you need lower latentces, and faster access to everything inside and outside your device, tablet, phablet, or phone.

If you have a notebook PC or ultrathin PC or ultrabook, it will have limited space. You have the option of having an external wireless or wired drive.

You can read about the two wireless options which are:

1. In-Home (or Office ) cloud using a Router and USB 3.0 Drive or
2. Using a stand alone wireless drive or portable cloud

Both are great options for wireless, but still limited by the speed of WiFi-N today. (I’d call those “Wireless Network Attached Storage” or “WNAS”. )

 Even with WiFi-AC coming now at 867 Mbps, USB 3.0 can deliver 4-5x those speeds.  You will need the option of connecting to fast external storage or Direct Attached Storage DAS using a wired interface at not just 5 Gbps, but 10 Gbps at least.

Why 10 Gbps?  Aren’t spinning hard drives rate limited by the mechanics?

Well yes, they are.

But, since you’ve read all my articles and blogs, you know that faster, cheaper SSDs are coming.  And you will be able to buy Terabytes of storage for external DAS and you will want to access lots of data quickly, as fast as if it was inside your device.
Aside:  Most importantly, in my mind at least, you will likely carry around a USB 3.0 Flash Drive that  is about 500 GB in size that will be your back up for all your files.  It might be a wireless drive in your backpack.  Certainly, you will have the cloud. You will have a USB 2.0 Flash Drive for file transfers of small sizes, but the option of carrying lots of your files, and having super fast access to it will be too cheap and too useful for most users to pass up.

Back to 10G USB.  A fast wired standard will be needed.  10G USB will be it.  It’s boring, but it’s true.  One interface to rule them all.

Here’s the original interview with Jeff Ravencraft, COO of the USB Implementers Forum, discussing Double-Speed USB 3.0, what I like to call 10G USB

Hopefully it will be embedded below.

AND there is this innovative company pushing Thunderbolt 2 at 20 Gbps.  I could be wrong, but an open alternative that is at least 1/2 that speed might be useful.

 

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Nothing funny today.  Maybe tomorrow.

This post is meant to bring some new readers up to speed (hahahahaha). So if you know all of this, congratulations. You are the only one to have read all 3 of my blog posts this year.

Yeah, that wasn’t funny either.

 

 

As I sit here at my son’s baseball game typing up this blog entry, I wonder if I should be typing up a blog entry at my son’s baseball game.

The State of USB – Spring 2013 – Tablets, Ultra books, and Phones

Sadly, USB 3.0 has not yet appeared it phones.

It should have. It hasn’t.

Now that that, is out of the way, let’s talk about why USB 3.0 should be in more phones.

Mobile Applications Processors with USB 3.0

1)      TI OMAP 5 (announced in 2011)

2)      Ivy Bridge (shipped in 100M units) not really a mobile apps processor, but used extensively in Ultrabooks

3)      Samsung Exynos 5 (announced in 2012)

4)      nVidia Tegra 4 (announced in April 2013)

5)      Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 (announced in 2012)

Let’s take them out of order because that’s the way my mind works

 

Ivy Bridge

Ivy Bridge has shipped in 100 M devices.

Some will say the Ivy Bridge tablets are just PCs.  Well, since they have touch screens and 5 hours of battery life, I think they are tablets.

There are 4 (at least) that are shipping now

The Microsoft Surface Pro, Samsung, TCL, and Dell Tablets.

 Microsoft Surface Pro

 Samsung Tablet

 Dell 18 inch tablet

TI OMAP 5

Announced in 2011 and demonstrated at CES 2012, TI OMAP 5 has USB 3.0 fully integrated.  Although TI has apparently refocused the TI OMAP 5 designs directed at automotive.  Which is good, because, lets face it, in car systems with navigation and entertainment are pretty much just mobile tablets with touch screens.

nVidia Tegra 4

Last year Fudzilla said the Tegra 4 would kick off the USB 3.0 tablet revolution. 

This Tegra 4 will likely debut this summer in the nVidia Shield, which is a gaming tablet with a controller. I can’t actually tell if the controller is detachable from the tablet. I suspect it has to be.

Samsung Exynos 5

The Exynos 5 started shipping in the Samsung Chromebook just a few months ago.  For $250 at Best Buy or Amazon, you get a keyboard and screen that will sync with Google Drive so you can work with documents, spreadsheets, and presentations both on and off line.  It plays games too.  It has USB 3.0 Host ports.  

The same chip will be in the Galaxy S4 which appears in the teardowns to only have a USB 2.0 port.  If the next generation Galaxy Tab comes out soon, maybe that will actually use the USB 3.0 externally.

Finally, we have the

Qualcomm Snapdragon 800

Which delivers both a USB 3.0 Device and Host in one mobile phone package.

You may have seen the Snapdragon theater where they streamed 4k video and 7.1 channel sound at CES.  The phone can also capture 55 MP images.  That’s right. 55 Megapixel.  I can’t figure that one out either.

So there you have it, 5 platforms, ready for the phone, tablet, and phablet market.  Ivy Bridge is shipping, Samsung is shipping.  The good news is that these leaders differentiate their products with USB 3.0.  We can hope and expect more will arrive soon.

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USB University

Remember to check out USB University.  It’s appropriate for managers and marketers working on or considering USB 3.0, and for architects and engineers that need deep technical detail.

For the few people that have tech issues, I’m sorry. We are working on them.

And my son’s team lost 0 to 18.  At least I think that was the score. I left before the end and they kept playing.  When I came back he was eating corn chips with melted cheese. And seemed happy as a kid eating corn chips with melted cheese.

Having finished off an entire bag of Siracha flavored potato chips left for me on Tuesday morning (Thanks Scott Knowlton, author of the PCIExpress Blog, !), I turn to the subject of monitors using USB 3.0 for Video.

Why in the world would anyone use USB for Video?

The answer is the Monitor becomes the docking station for your PC.

In many corporate environments, users have a docking station for laptop where they plug in their PC

OR

Users plug in the video cable (VGA), and then (hopefully) a USB Hub with their favorite Keyboard, Mouse, or wireless mouse keyboard dongle, and maybe an Ethernet connection.

In monitors now offered by HP, Dell and AOC have an integrated USB 3.0 Hub and the DisplayLink chip.

The Hub provides multiple USB ports to use to plug in your favorite USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 peripherals.

The DisplayLink Chip does all the work to carry the video over USB 3.0.  No HDMI cable is needed. 

Of course, the monitor still has HDMI ports (most likely) but the PC doesn’t need to have it.

So you walk up and connect 1 cable to your nice, big monitor (because your eyes are like mine and you like a big monitor) and you can use your nice big keyboard at your ergonomic workstation.

Dell, HP, and AOC monitors with DisplayLink chip and USB 3.0 Hub

We have several videos with DisplayLink describing their products and how they work. Here is the DisplayLink Success Story where they explain how they used Synopsys USB 3.0 PHY IP, USB 3.0 Device IP, and HDMI IP in their design.

Essentially, video is compressed if necessary in cases where both video and data are being sent and there isn’t enough bandwidth for uncompressed video.  In this way, the DisplayLink chip ensures good quality video, and low latency (for example, when you move the USB mouse it immediately moves on the display). 

In the mouse example, the data travels from the mouse to the docking station, over the USB 3.0 cable into the PC, is processed, represented in video and sent back   out video over the same USB 3.0 cable to display on the screen.

Just a Note – Thunderbolt does this already for video and data on all Apple PCs. You can read about Thunderbolt in these blogs.

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Proof of Potato Chips

Here’s the bag of chips I ate

Okay, I didn’t eat the whole bag.

Probably

Now that you are back from the Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder’s meeting in Omaha, filled with Gorat’s Steakhouse steak and Dairy Queen goodness, your thoughts naturally turn to USB 3.0 and ask:

Where can I find USB 3.o in WiFi?

After you read about wireless drives in last week’s entry, you need a fast router that is also WiFi-AC to connect quickly to other “stuff” on your network.  A USB 3.0 Host port on that router lets you create an in-home, personal cloud for everyone to share the same pictures, videos, and tax records across all your tablets, PCs, and phones.

WiFi routers with USB 3.0 with the slower, widespread WiFi-N standard have shipped since March 2013, over a year now, with more in December.  Those routers had USB 3.0 host ports on them, but you were actually rate limited by the speed of the WiFi. 

Back last summer, there were no USB Dongles to speed up your PC.  One WiFi-AC dongle that did exist was rate limited because it used only USB 2.0 (that was last year, and I thought I blogged about it, but apparently I was on vacation).

The first USB 3.0 WiFi dongle is the Trendnet WiFi dongle written about here just 3 weeks ago – Go here and read this then come back here.

By the way, since Realtek (our USB 3.0 customer) is the only company to announce availability of a WiFi-AC chip supporting this, I’m guessing this is the Realtek chip. This is a pure guess.

WiFi-AC Routers with USB 3.0

The first WiFi-AC routers only had USB 2.0 host ports.  So you were rate limited by the speed of the USB 2.0 host port into your drive.  WiFi-AC could go up the 867 Mbps, while the USB 2.0 storage drive could operate no faster than 320 Mbps (if it has good drives).  Now, you have WiFi-AC routers with USB 3.0 Host ports.  So you can create your personal cloud, a fast personal cloud at home and in your small office with one router and one USB 3.0 drive.

There’s the D-Link AC1200 Router which you can read about at engadget.

and the Netgear R6520 WiFi-AC Router which you can read about at MaximumPC.

So finally, the world comes together to make a fast, in-home personal cloud using WiFi-AC and USB 3.0. 

I should note that any transaction can be limited in speed based on several sources of latency. Check out this blog entry on latency for more info.

  

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Here’s some donuts put out at 1:10pm.

This is at 1:12pm

I guess I was stress eating

As your thoughts turn to spring, and the great outdoors (except for in Minnesota where I’m from, where you watched fishing on TV this past weekend), you naturally ask yourself, “What is going on with that whole USB 3.0 thing?”

Well, it’s been 1 year since the Ivy Bridge chipset started shipping with USB 3.0 fully integrated.  This chipset has shipped in about 100 million PCs, notebooks, and ultrabooks.  How do I know this?

1) It’s my best guess

2) Paul Otellini said that they’ve shipped 100 million chips in their 22nm process. 

I’m guessing this is Ivy Bridge.  This Blog from 1 year ago explains why chipset integration is important.

Wireless Drives with USB 3.0

So it turns out the big thing now in drives is Wireless Drives with USB 3.0.  Yes, Wireless.   Why does Wireless Drive need USB 3.0?

First, if you have multiple PCs in your home, you want to be able to access all your data wirelessly, the same data as fast as possible.  You can just move around a USB 3.0 hard drive, but wireless is better.  So you can buy WiFi Routers with a USB 3.0 Host port, and just plug your USB 3.0 Hard Drive into that host port and everyone can share one drive with all your pictures, videos, and legally obtained hollywood or bollywood movies.  And every song written by Psy. 

Yes, a personal in-home cloud can be made with a router and a USB 3.0 Hard Drive (or flash drive) because you read my blog Wireless requires Wired USB 3.0.

Enter Tablets

As a species, anthropologists tell use we are moving toward using tablets and smart phones.  Since we, in the semiconductor industry follow the advice of anthropologists, we started something like 100 tablet designs since 2010.  Which happens to be the launch year of the iPad. 

Of course, you want to access everything wirelessly.  At home you have the personal cloud.

But when you are on the road, your iPad or tablet or smart phone has limited memory.   And you have all those movies you want to carry with you.

Enter the personal, portable cloud powered by the Wireless Storage drive, in this case 4 of them.

For about $200, you can buy a Seagate, Corsair, Patriot, and SkyDrive.  They all have integrated batteries so you can stream video continuously for 5 hours.

Why do they need USB 3.0?  Because the data rates for WiFi-N are still limited to less than about 0.3 Gbps. If you actually want to transfer data on and off the drives quickly, you need to plug the drive into a computer and transfer your content at something like 1.8 Gbps to 3 Gbps.

(Remember, drive speeds, or any read/write speeds are dependent on a range of latencies.  For the many sources of latency, check out this blog entry on latency and how it drags down USB 3.0 and WiFi performance.  )

The point is, no matter how fast wireless gets, wired always coexists with wireless.

 

One final note, if you swapped out the spinning media from these drives, and put in a SATA based SSD you’d drop the power about 67%.  This should extend the battery life well beyond 5 hours, but the WiFi itself still consumers power, so we can assume it will extend the battery life somewhere between 1-3 hours.  Patriot sells an enclosure so you could do this with your own SSD of any size with a Patriot enclosure for 50 dollars.

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Tip of the Day

Check back here daily for more insightful, useful, info on USB.

Check out USB University to learn about USB 3.0 from the ground up.  Really, for anyone managing a USB 3.0 project or starting one or considering one. It’s great stuff.

“The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.” – Albert Einstein

“The most aggravating thing about the younger generation is that I no longer belong to it.” – Albert Einstein

USB University is Here!

Synopsys is the place to buy your USB IP, controllers, PHYs, and Verification IP.  Learn the USB 3.0 spec in depth with our key Architect Matt Myers, one of the authors of the USB 3.0 Specification and the xHCI Specification, and probably a bunch more.

Matt starts from the beginning so even Marketing Managers can understand USB 3.0.  It’s 5 full hours of training by one of the top USB minds in the Universe.  Click on USB University and try it out today. (Okay, if you click on the image below, it will only open the image, so click here on USB University)

Before you click on the image above be sure to send this post on to all your engineers and marketing and friends.

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Tip of the Day

Never eat sushi in a restaurant where you are the only customer.

Quotes of the Day

“Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.” – Albert Einstein

Just to support the argument that Video Camera Makers should integrate flash( because a 4 part article isn’t enough) and we can expect Smartphones and Tablets to integrate more memory.

The primary drivers to greater NAND flash are the increasing demands of Smart Phone and Tablet users to run more apps, store more high resolution pictures (like the 13MP camera on the Samsung Galaxy S4) and eventually, in the future, those using the 4k video cameras supported by sensors by companies like Aptina.  Go ahead do a search on 4k and Aptina and Android and you will see it.

I read an IC Insights report that says that NAND flash average selling prices will drop to 17 cents per Gigabyte by 2017.

So the addition of 128 or 256GB so a design ends up costing something like $20 or $40.  In addition, the NAND flash parts are getting bigger.  The ones that sell the most are expected to be the 2 largest NAND flash parts.  I should note this isn’t the fastest flash but the average selling price.  We can certainly expect the fastest flash found in my Crucial SSD will drop in price as well as the capacity will increase.  This (again) supports the idea that 10G USB will also be needed for external storage, and SSDs will likely make the transition to replace smaller USB Hard Drives in the 2017 time frame or sooner.

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Tips of the Day

Don’t tug on Superman’s cape

Don’t go yachting off the coast of Somalia

Don’t argue with a Wookie

I think two of those are based on fiction of some kind. I could be wrong, so really it’s only a Tip of the Day.

Send me your Tip of the Day.  That’s pretty much all I had stored up.

 

TrendNet started making the world’s first WiFi-AC Dongle with USB 3.0.   It says it supports speeds up to 867 Mbps.  This is important because the USB 2.0 dongles can’t even come close to this at effective speeds of 320-350 Mbps.  USB 3.0 can deliver 3000-3500 Mbps.

So this dongle actually delivers the speeds WiFi AC promises.  USB isn’t the bottleneck.

So why would I need 867 Mbps when my internet service is only 1-20 Mbps?  Because you are connected to a WiFi Router that has a USB 3.0 Hard Drive (or Flash Drive) attached to it for central storage of your pictures, videos, and vacation plans (That sounds better than Tax info doesn’t it?).

Read about those first WiFi-N routers here:

But wait!

You want a WiFi AC router with USB 3.0?

Well that was announced recently too by Netgear. You can read about the first WiFi-AC router with USB 3.0 built in here.

 

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Tip of the Day

To lose weight, eat less, exercise more.