USB is 30 Years old, USB-IF talks USB4 120Gbps, USB-C 240W and Certified Cables

Hi. >> Hi. My name is Jeff Ravencraft. I'm the president chief operating officer of the USB implementers forum or what we abbreviate as the USBIF. And we're here at EPHA in Berlin, Germany 2026. And we're celebrating the 30-year anniversary of USB 1.0. 30 years ago, January 19th, 1996. If you can sit down for a second. So this is a special document you have right here. This >> is the original specification. The original >> and >> so these are the guys. >> These were the original promoter companies. This has changed, right? Compact's now HP. Deck is gone. IBM gave the PC sold the PC business to Lenovo. Intel is still there. Microsoft NEC is now Renis. Northern Telecom is gone. But these were the original core guys. And who are these guys? These are some of the signatures. This is AJ Bot. He's considered the father of USB, the invention. And this was initially conceptually uh incubated within Intel Corporation. >> Is that why there's a B in USB? >> No. >> No. [laughter] No. Okay. And then and some of the other guys you want to mention. Here's AJ Bala Kadami. Um here's Brad Hustler, the key engineer. Kosar Jaff was with Microsoft at the time. Uh so these were some of the key players. >> And uh if you can sit down for a second um so how long have you been involved? >> I've been involved from uh the late 90s early 2000. So yeah over 25 years or more 26 years >> and in 30 years it's been more than 30 billion right shipped. Oh, there are billions of USB products shipped into the market every year. Um, you know, even standard A, which uh is still a very popular connection because in the install base, there are over 20 billion standard A products in the install base and then USBC on top of that. So the industry is shipping yearly in excess of four and a half to five billion products every year, year-over-year into the marketplace. >> We're talking about a product with at least one USB port or we talking about USB ports? >> At least one USB port. >> So it could be like 20, 30, 40, 50 billion ports and cables and >> yeah, some products have multiple ports like like a laptop or a hub, right? What was the the idea in the 1.0 1 1.0 didn't actually launch on the market, right? >> It was like the first kind of like uh >> It did launch. >> It launched. >> Yes. Yes, of course. >> So, but what was uh um wasn't it 1.1 that kind of really became something or >> No, 1 1.1 was just um the um adding uh the corrections or edits. Uh but 1.0 took off. 1.1 was just updating the edits. >> So, if I have a look here, >> I'm going to show you the the I'm going to show you the um the problem statement. Okay. And then I'll show you the the key players. >> And this is the original. There's only one of these booklets. >> There's only one with these signatures. Yes, >> this is the original copy. >> Nice. >> But this is the problem statement. circa 1990. Look at this. Consumers were trying to figure this out. Consumers don't know anything about this stuff. This was also expensive for OEMs. These connectors cost a lot of money, right? So, Intel said, "We've got to make it easier for consumers to connect peripherals to the laptop because if we do that, we'll sell the industry will sell more PCs. we're going to float all boats, right? And so that's how they came up conceptually with USB universal serial bus. Okay. >> So there was FireWire, there was Ethernet, there was all these Apple things, >> RS232 audio. >> Yes. And then here were the original Intel founding members. AJ Bot, I showed you his signature. He's considered the father of USB. Balac Kadami, Jim Papus, Steve Wallace. But Intel had to make a decision. Do we keep it for ourselves or do we make it an open standard? And Intel made the decision to make it an open standard and make it royaltyfree. And so that in and of itself became, I think, a major uh motivation driving adoption. It was free, no royalty, and it was excellent technology, right? easy to use. >> So when the when there's five billion shipped per year, they don't pay you 5 billion cents. >> No, >> no, no royalty. >> You you pay for the device. >> Yeah. And it >> But there's no royalty for the actual port. >> Yeah. Uh Lenovo say on this ThinkPad, they're not paying anybody. They're paying someone for a chip, you know, for a a controllers, but they're not paying an ongoing fee at all. Is there like membership and people can join a membership and that's paid pay payment system? >> Yeah, for for our organization uh the USBF our revenue is driven by membership and as a member you get your vendor ID number included. You get your fee for your trademark license agreement in order to use the logo on certified products and um you can participate in our workshops and get your product certified for free. Yes, but that's just a um your membership fee I think covers 2 years and um and then you renew. >> Are there a lot of members? >> We have over a thousand members globally >> after this video. Could be 2,000 maybe. >> It could be. >> So you I mean you want to welcome more members, right? >> Oh yeah, of course. Of course. And our members are the who's who of the technology industry. Our board of directors is Apple, HP, um, Intel, Microsoft, um, ST Micro Electronics, Renesus out of Japan, and, uh, Texas Instruments. >> Are there also Chinese companies that want to be members? >> Oh, they are members >> and more and more. >> Oh, there we have many. Chinese, Korean, Japanese, any technology company that major players as well as others, they're they're in our they're members. Samsung, Hitachi, Sony, uh Google, you you name it. They're they're >> because maybe they have ideas for kind of like opinions what should be the next the future, right? So, they have to join to kind of help influence that. >> Well, we we don't define in our group, we don't define the core specs. That's done by what I showed you here, what we call a promoter group. And this is a separate legal entity called the USB promoter group. And companies can join that as a contributor and yes participate in the work group and and help defining and frame the next generation, right? Are there also companies that uh kind of like uh uh fork their way differently than the industry because they really want to do something different for a while and wait and see if the rest of the industry also want to adopt it? >> No, >> no. People want to go in the same direction. >> They can do that, but they've got to drive adoption. and they, you know, if they take the the USB technology and misuse it or um make false statements about it, then that becomes a legal map. >> You just can't take it and do whatever you want. >> That's going to be bad, right? >> So, here it says USB the most successful IO. >> Yes, absolutely. USB out ships any IO you can tone. Wi-Fi, HDMI, you can put all those together, Bluetooth, they will not outshift USB. That's how big it is. >> And uh it seems that for example, USB is always the fastest bandwidth. >> Today it's option usually. >> Yes, >> cuz if you want to do 80 Gbits, if you want to do 10 Gbits or >> this will now do 120 Gbit per second data rate in one direction. for high-end displays, multiple displays, uh desktop, uh hubs, um and and those types of high-end products. >> Are there people that want to push this even further, right? >> Oh, do 240. >> The the industry will the as technology moves on, you we're going to have to uh help lead it, right? >> Yes. Yes. >> Is it possible that the chip, the port, the cable gets hot when it's 120 sustained for a long time? >> No. >> Totally fine. >> Yes. Yeah. >> That's like a dream. >> Yes. >> And you can also give it 120 watts. Yes. >> A lot of power. >> Yep. And you have 120 Well, 240 watts. >> But data rate is 120 gigs, >> right? And on power over type-c at the high end, you could deliver 240 watts. >> That's a lot. >> It's a lot. >> People can do also do display with that. >> Yes. Oh, yes. Absolutely. >> They can dedicate some for display, some for data. >> Yep. >> And when you do power, it doesn't take anything away from the data. >> No, >> it's different. >> There's separate separate highways, separate channels. The power in and of itself is separate. >> Is it fair to say that some people dream about USB because they just want more bandwidth, more power, and they think, "Ah, I want to do more with this cable." I can tell you I dream about it all the time. Uh, no. Yes, of course. Um, because of the success and the adoption, the ease of use. The the the key thing I want to drive home is this led what today people refer to ease of view. This was the leader in making it easy for the general consumer to work with electronic peripherals in their computers. Back in the day, you'd have to open a box of a PC, a desktop, and put in addin cards. Consumers don't do that. The general consumer doesn't know anything about it and they're not going to do it and we had to make it easy and this is the easiest technology to use in the whole world. >> I wonder if it would make sense to have a very affordable cable tester that anybody can get. You know, like you have battery testers, you need to check how much battery is left, but I want to test my cables to know which one is 80, which one is 120, which one is 240. And then I want to put stickers on them just so I have better uh organization at home. >> Well, um >> cuz there I have so many USB cables and I always forget which one does what. >> Yeah. On our cables that we certify, the USB certifies, it has to come to our lab with already the appropriate cable logo on the cable or we will not accept it for testing. And it has to say the data rate that it can support and the power. >> That's great. >> But that's only recent. It's only a few years you've been >> over three years now. >> Three years. >> But remember, not everybody gets their stuff certified by us. But you can buy these cheap uh less expensive cable uh I wouldn't say testers. They can tell you what the cable capabilities are. They're in the market today. >> It's less expensive. It's not a $8,000 box that Tesla >> No, no, no. But here's the thing. Consumers don't do that either. They're not going to do that. Consumers don't know anything about it. I'm I'm not I'm not dinging the consumer. I'm talking about my brother Frank in Dayton, Ohio in America. He's a truck driver. He doesn't know anything about technology. He doesn't want to know and he doesn't care. He wants to know how fast can it go and how much power can it give me? And that's all the general consumer knows. They don't know USB 3.2 or USB 4.2 version 2 or USB power delivery 3.2. That's why we use very simple branding. Consumers don't know anything about it. >> This tells the consumer it's 80 gigabit data rate. Period. [laughter] Packaging logo and then on the product on the port. >> And how much it cost to get this certified for this? >> Oh, I don't know. We We don't We don't If you're a member, an OEM member of the You can come to a workshop and get it certified for free. If you don't come to a workshop, you send it to one of our 24 authorized labs, uh, which is back here >> all over the world. >> Yeah. There's about a lot in Asia. Well, yeah, that's where most of this stuff is made. >> There's some here in Europe and the US in California. >> All right. >> But we do not derive any revenue from our authorized labs. We authorize them. They have to have certified engineers by us. They have to attend our workshops. We audit them regularly, but we do not set pricing or derive revenue. We're not involved with their their business. So when you you get the little logo that shows the speed and the power, it also means that it has passed um uh interference testing and stuff like that stability and because you don't want to have too much interference with the cables, right? It has to be >> the tests are >> stable. >> You wouldn't believe the amount of tests that has to pass. >> And we we have something with the cables. They have to go into what we call a poisonous gas chamber. And what that does is it dates the cable five and 10 years to see the wear on the cable on the material on we do 10,000 insertions on the connector. The tests are many many many levels of testing. >> They the people wouldn't even believe it. You can go to the website and look at it. Yeah, >> I've noticed some of my recent cables get uh in the bends, you know, the kind of breaks up the the bending radius or something >> and because it was too tightly packed in my bag or something and and every day I'm always thinking about USB performance of my cables, which one I need to use for my fast SSD to the Mac, which one I need to use to charge my phone at full 120, you know, like I was [laughter] It's uh I need to organize this better. I need to get only certified cables. >> Just buy the highest end cable that's certified and you're good to go cuz it's all backward compatible. >> USB 4 >> 120 GB is backward compatible to here >> all the way back. And it seems some cables they fit more tightly than others and they're like a little bit more like uh seems that they will be more stable. >> That's not us. That's the OEM. >> We define the spec defines the mechanical requirement, but that's that's up to the the manufacturer. Right. >> Nice. And what else are you talking about here? The IFA EA. >> Well, mainly uh the our branding, the anniversary, what it means to the industry and Obviously, we can't talk about things that are unannounced, but this is going to continue on, right? The technology is going to continue to move forward. >> So, this just going to be more fun. >> More fun. >> More fun with the USB cables. >> Yes. Yes. And um this is our cables. Now, we have only we will only certify two power cables. a 60 watt cable at the low end and a 240 watt cable at the high end. So if the cable goes above 60 and we certify it, it has to deliver be able to deliver up to 240. And so for each cable instantiation, then you have the data rate and then you see the packaging logo and then the the over mold logo, right? We advertise our brands that I showed you globally. In Germany, the ads run on Amazon and Google in German. >> In France, they run in French. In Chinese, in China, they run in simplified Chinese, etc., right? And this is our consumer site. This is not usb.org. This is certifiedusb.com and this is a site we built for consumers. It will simply explain to them in layman's terms the technology and what the logos mean. We've had 60 million views of the video on the site year to date. We've had 32 million views of this site, visits to the site year to date. This is huge for us and it's from all over the world. Consumers are coming here to learn, right? >> So, it's on the package. There's a cure code or something. It goes there. >> Yeah. On on the ad, it it will give them the link to the to the site. >> And uh active optical, is that supported? If people want supported there's not a lot of people, 100 meters. >> Yeah. But it costs too much money, right? People aren't doing it. I mean you you can get those products at the very high end and we support it but the general consumer uh it's it's not relevant right it it costs too much and the last thing I should tell you and you were mentioning this earlier if you're buying a cable or any type of charger or product that costs less than the can of soda at your convenience store that you're buying the the cable at or the charger a consumer really should think about that, you know, they don't they think, "Oh, uh, you know, uh, so and so the the the convenience store selling it, it must be fine." Not necessarily. If it's that cheap, just because it's cheap doesn't mean it's good. How many of the USB cables on this planet are good? What's the percentage? >> It's a strange question. >> I don't know. >> I hope it's more than 50%. >> Oh, yeah. No, I think I can tell you um there are yes a lot of companies don't get certified but I think >> sometimes you get a such a cheap cable with the device >> because you just need a charge it looks like it's working >> but it doesn't take many weeks or whatever and suddenly it's just fails >> right >> doesn't work the charging need to go in the trash >> but I can tell you how many emails we get about poor products and things not working we get basically zero So it the standard is doing what it's supposed to do which is this stuff certified or not will work together. >> It works the way it should work. >> So without revealing what's next let's say it could be more data more power >> more video stuff. >> We'll see. >> Could be. >> Yes.