With Compaq Computer Corp, IBM Corp, Microsoft Corp, NEC Corp, Digital Equipment Corp and Northern Telecom Ltd cheerleading, Intel Corp has unveiled the Universal Serial Bus as a single port from which up to 63 peripherals can be daisychained from a personal computer. It supports a 1.5M-bytes per second data transfer rate – against today’s standard serial port data transfer rate of 400K-bytes per second, so it has enough bandwidth to support advanced telephony applications. Users will be able to connect standard devices such as modems, printers, scanners, and speakers, without having to worry about configuration issues or slot availability. The new specification is expected to be finalised by mid-year and will be made available free; Intel is exp ected to include the bus as part of all future chip sets. The bus will present a single round jack in the back of the computer; it supports isochronous and asynchronous data transfer, off ers a star-hub architecture so the port controller can link up to 63 peripherals, and auto-configuration to recognise and configure any external USB Universal Se rial Bus-based peripheral.
