I read a couple of articles in this weeks EE Times that may be of interest to non-EE’s as well.
The first is about a pending war of the serial interfaces, USB 3.0 guns for Firewire. The print edition also contains a drawing of the new cable core for USB 3.0. The new cable has six additional conductors to accommodate the new two channel physical layer. I didn’t see any indication of what the new connectors will look like but, since they are leaving the existing four USB 2.0 conductors intact, it should be possible to make backwards compatible connectors. IEEE-1394 (Firewire) is also in the process of speeding up the transfer rates to about the same as USB 3.0. Firewire has an advantage in that its cable and connector system does not need to be changed to get the higher rate. Since USB 3.0 has 3 parallel serial channels maybe they should rename it UPSB, on second thought that sounds like a discount delivery service. đŸ™‚
The other article is about how measurement and analysis methods from Electronics help predict global warming.
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