The widely used USB interface officially gets an upgrade to a version 3.0 Monday (Nov. 17) at a developers' conference here where a handful of companies are expected to announce product plans for the new spec with data rates that could hit 400 Mbytes/second. USB 3.0 is capable of delivering at least 300 Mbytes/s of throughput at the application layer. It is backwards compatible with early versions of the spec, however it will require new cabling and connectors and is limited to distances of about three meters, down from five meters for today's USB products.

Full story: eetimes.com