 We all depend on USB in our daily computing lives and the introduction of USB 4 is bringing us huge advancements in what we can do with it. The USB Implementers Forum or USB IF is a nonprofit organization or corporation, I should say founded by a group of companies that developed the universal serial bus specification. USB IF doesn't make any products and they don't speak for any of the hardware vendors, but rather they facilitate the development of USB peripherals and promote the benefits of the products that have passed compliance testing. With that preamble, I'd like to introduce two people to you, the USB IF's chairman, Brad Saunders and Ramal Ismail, the USB IF Chief Technology Officer. Welcome to the show, gentlemen. Thank you. Thank you. All right, so I told these guys that they could get down and nerdy with me, so buckle up everybody, we're gonna have some fun. All right. Depends on where your subject matter goes, of course. Right, right. Well, so we know we're supposed to be excited about USB4, but I think it's fair to say that most of us are probably under misconceptions about what USB4 is and what it's not. Can you clarify this for us? What is USB4? Okay, so let me give you very brief background. So we all grew up with USB2, the original USB and then SuperSpeed USB came out. And of course that's associated with a spec that people know as the USB3 standard. And for SuperSpeed USB, it brought a lot more speed than USB2. We had five gigabit and 10 gigabit and 20 gigabit eventually. And please note, 20 gigabit USB required the USB Type-C connector. And SuperSpeed USB brought the ability to have data go both in and out of the computer at the same time. So much faster, plus it was bidirectional and data transfer. USB4 though is a new architecture is on top of that. And in fact, it's complementary to those two technologies. USB2 exists in parallel to USB4, just like it did in parallel to SuperSpeed USB. But USB4 now takes the SuperSpeed USB and includes that protocol as one of some of the tunnels that it uses over the USB Type-C cable and connector. So USB4 brought this ability to merge data communications as a separate tunnel from normal display communications. So if you're trying to drive a display, you can do that in parallel to exchanging data. So now everybody has probably heard that USB4 is another version or at least based on what Intel delivered a few years back called Thunderbolt 3. So what happened was the Intel architecture for Thunderbolt 3 was contributed to the USB group and we developed USB4 to do essentially the same architecture which is display and data in parallel. And it allows us to manage the bandwidth of the two. The data itself is SuperSpeed USB. It's our friend is just now being carried in one of the tunnels across the interface. Okay, so the reason you're focusing on data and display at the same time is if you have a single cable going from your computer to a display to devices that are hooked up to it, then you'd be able to say right to a disk while sending video to a display. Absolutely. Okay, exactly. So here's the motivation. When we developed the USB Type-C solution initially, we were taking this older style standard A connector and now making it a nice, simple, small, easy to plug in. Reversible. Reversible, flippable, yay, yeah. So as we did that, computers still had a lot of connectors. One of the other things we did in parallel with that, of course, is also deliver more power over that connector. So now the notebook computer was saying, oh, great, I got data and power, but I still have a bunch of other connectors on there. What are my opportunities to reduce the number of connector types on my product? The one that really stuck out was display, right? HDMI, mini-display port for those various connectors. That is really what brought about the kind of early technology associated with this, which is the display port alternate mode and of course Thunderbolt, which both chose to optimize trying to bring data and display out of the same connector. So I do wanna, I wanna make you pause there a little bit because I just happened to this week been learning a little bit about this display port alternate thing because I have an older display port Apple display and I wanted to plug it into a PC that's got HDMI and that's a no bueno. And I did a post, I think after I talked to you guys once before entitled, just because it fits doesn't mean it'll work. And I knew I could get all the connectors together to plug it in, but I discovered that it didn't matter. I would have to spend a lot of money to make it actually do something. So display port alternate is some other technology. So the simple way to look at this is in the computer PC world and I include Max's PCs. Yes. In that world display port technology is the predominant interface for external monitors. In the consumer electronics world, it's HDMI TVs, right? Right. And in certain notebook brands, they kind of cross over because take a major notebook OEM, they cater some of their notebooks to business users, computer types, hence they have display port connectors. Okay. Or same company sells very similar computer to a end user who has televisions and the thing they put an HDMI interface on it. So it turns out you can bridge from display port to HDMI very, very easily. And as such, you'll find a lot of little adapters, dongles which are USB type C. They actually do display port alternate mode at the interface and then they have an HDMI connector on the end. Right. All I wanted was the other way around. Well, that one's not commonly available, I'm afraid. Well, I did find for about $100, I could get an active power device that would do it, but it's doing all the math apparently. There's, in the reverse direction, I don't think it's quite as easy, yeah, but. Okay. It turns out display port alternate mode adapter is HDMI is a major sell, a major volume seller in that little dongle. But that said, most home users that are going out and buying new displays through their home offices, they're getting a display port oriented display or better still one that has USB type C connections directly on it. Yeah, it seems that USB type C is really starting to take off in displays now. I just had interviewed ViewSonic where they were showing off all of their USB C displays. I mean, that just brings joy to your heart when you see that. When you have a USB C display and USB type C, that's the shape of the connector, USB type C on a laptop, what is the protocol that's going across that? Is that display port, is it HDMI? No, in most cases today it is display port using what we call the display port alternate mode, which is, by the way, the specification for that, if you're techy, it was written by the organization that owns the display port technology, which is the VESA organization. And they worked with us to coordinate on being able to use a protocol we put in USB type C that allowed for it to switch into this alternate mode. Okay. A Thunderbolt happens to be another alternate mode, right? Thunderbolt is the one that was invented by Intel and marketed by Intel to be, again, do display and data at the same time. And to be techy still, Thunderbolt 3 tunnels, remember I mentioned tunneling, display port technology and PCI Express technology. PCI Express is traditionally seen as an inside the computer interface that's a data interface. The old card slots in the big tower PCs, those were PCIe. And that technology brought those two together and it allowed you to connect displays and external technology that was compatible with PCI Express. And in the Thunderbolt 3 solution, one of those technologies happened to be a USB host controller, the ability to then send USB connectivity downstream of a Thunderbolt dock. They do it by putting a PCI Express based host controller. Now, here's the difference. USB 4, now remember, we've donated, we've, if I put my Intel hat on, we donated to the USB community the underlying technology of Thunderbolt. And in fact, made it an open standard by doing such. But this is USB technology after all. So the data interface became the super speed USB data interface. So USB 4 can actually tunnel three types of data, display port data, super speed USB, which is our favorite. And of course, it can also tunnel PCI Express. Part of the reason for doing that was to help maintain backward compatibility, of course, to the existing Thunderbolt ecosystem. Okay, all right. Well, I understand why most of us are confused because that was a lot of information. So if your elevator speech on USB, what USB 4 is, what would the short version of that be? Okay, it's obviously adds higher performance over super speed USB because now we have 40 gigabits per second. Yet instead of just being USB data only, it's display and data. And again, display port is the interface for display and USB is the interface for data. And then of course, PCI Express could optionally be used as well in parallel. So it tunnels all the same, all that content over one connection. And the third thing that's kind of important is it manages the bandwidth between them. To make a nice effective solution for the user. Balance your display performance with your data performance and so forth. Does all that negotiation for you? Okay, I like that. That was good. I liked all the depth and then I liked narrowing it down to the pieces, but that got us there. That's great. So all right, we're sold on USB 4, okay? I'm a believer now, I need this, this is fantastic. How would a normal human know? Well, not even a normal human, but one of us. How would we know if a computer or peripheral has USB 4 since they're all USB type C connectors with all these other options? How would we know? Yeah, that's a good question. But on the other hand, for most users, it turns out you don't really need to know. But so let me be clear first that when you connect two things together, the protocol we have behind USB type C does its very best to get you the best connection you can get based on the common capabilities between two things. So if it's only USB 2 capable, but it's a USB 4 host, you get USB 2, right? Okay, and by the host, you mean the computer, is that correct? Right, if it's super speed USB, you get super speed USB. If it's USB 4, of course, on both sides, you get the best of both worlds, right? You get the best. Now, obviously there's a cable in the middle, so you need to have a cable that does more than USB 2. There are USB type C cables that are USB 2 only. They're kind of popular in the phone and charging space. That was gonna be one of my questions was, in my following question was gonna be, how would we know if the cable we have is, I mean, I've got piles of USB C cables here, they're all over my desk right now, I've got them everywhere. How do I know which ones are gonna do USB 4 only USB 2? Correct, so USB IF has always had a cable marking icon and I have to say that the industry at large has hit and miss on whether it uses this icon properly on your cable. Okay. We, as an organization, we can't absolutely mandate it, that it get used and interestingly enough, some of the decisions made to not use it are by people who think they're making their cable cooler by not having things like icons and labels on it. No, no, no, no, no, I see the symbol, it helps me. I agree with you, absolutely. And, you know, USB IF does a job of advertising and trying to convince people that this is the right way to do it. So there are specific icons for the plug of your cable. There are specific logos for when you buy a cable, the pack thing. And these logos will tell you whether it's the old USBs like high speed USB, or whether it's super speed USB, or whether it's in fact USB 4. So I've got a great idea. Here's what you do. Come out with a template for users to make their own little wrap around cable designators that tell it like, when you buy it, you've got the package, it says it's USB 4. Now I've got, I can download your little thing, run it through my little sticker printer thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. My label maker and I put it on all my cables and then I'm okay. So Ramon just took that idea and he's gonna go build in his garage, a cable labeling business. Not necessarily a bad idea. I would actually do that. I mean, if you had that, I would do it. Well, I know somebody that does that kind of stuff. With all the cables he buys, he labels them. I have multiple boxes. Sure, we all do. We label all the ones that go down under the desk. So when you're crawling under there using your phone as a light, you could go in and go, oh, is this the display? Whoops, nope, that was my computer. I just unplugged. You wanna solve that problem. Okay, so back to the point. There are icons and, you know, Alison, we sent you, hopefully Joe has sent you a image capture of all our defined cable icons. First thing to note, all SuperSpeed USB cables that are USB type C can provide USB 4 connectivity. First things first. Say that one more time. All existing SuperSpeed USB cables, well, obviously I mean ones that function properly, that are USB type C to USB type C connectivity are USB 4 compatible. Now, you didn't have to go buy a USB 4 cable. You probably are a young one. Okay, so all SuperSpeed USB type C cables are USB 4 compatible. Okay. Now, USB 4 offers 20 gigabits per second and a new higher 40 gigabit per second solution. Okay. The existing cables are compatible with the USB 4 20 gigabit per second solution. Okay. Out of the box. Now, the really cool thing about this, I'm even talking about the original SuperSpeed cable that you might have bought that was rated at five gigabits per second. Oh, really? Oh, really? So there's a technical simplification for you. As long as you know the cable is a SuperSpeed cable, you've got USB 4 connectivity with that cable. So I've seen the, I've got a Keldit TS3 plus dock and on the back of it, it says SS. Next one, that's the SuperSpeed symbol. I don't remember ever seeing it on a cable though. So there is a little icon that has a little SS with the Trident. Okay. And there are three versions of that that are labeled 5, 10 and 20. Okay. Now, very early on, there were ones that said SS with the Trident that didn't have a number. Uh-huh. And that was back in the day when we only had five. Okay. Those would still work. Those would still work with USB 4. At 20 gigabits per second. At 20 gigabits, that's fantastic. Now, why does that work? The geeky answer is that we made the devices and the hosts take on more responsibility for some of the signal gain control across the cable such that this old cable, which might have been seen as a lossy, if you might call it, isn't as lossy or degrading when we're running USB 4 operation. Oh, that's... So USB 4 as a signal interface is more capable in that sense. Okay. So it works with older cables, really cool. We're now in the process of getting all of the 10 gigabit per second and 20 gigabit per second USB cables to move to the new USB 4 20 gigabit per second cable icon, which is new. Okay, does it have a 20 on it? It has a 20 on it. It's got a little nicer design, a little more modern. And it lines really well with our certification brands, which you find when you buy the product on the package. Yeah, I wanted you to talk about the certifying. So one of the things that I read was that USB AF promotes the benefits of products that have passed compliance testing. So what are those benefits and how will we know if a product has passed that compliance testing? So all of the products that pass are eligible to then use under license the USB AF defined certification logos, which are nice colorful logo with the USB broadly predominant in the logo plus the speed rating. So it's got the name of USB. So it's simple USB and it's this fast. It's 20 gigabits per second or 40 gigabits per second, for example. The disc goes on the marketing, the packaging of the product when you go to buy it. Retailers are able to use this to help educate people that this is what you look for. Okay. And on the cable, a cable that's certified can also use the certified cable icon that goes with it. And again, it has the number of 20 or 40 and the familiar little Trident, right? Okay. If your cable's marked with that or your port is marked with that icon or when you bought the cable, it came with that certification logo or you bought the computer or you bought the device, then you know you have something that has gone through very rigorous testing that really aims to verify the interoperability of that cable with other products that are similarly capable or tested. Okay. And in fact, one of our key responsibilities for our CTO is to oversee this program for certification and compliance. Okay, great. So this does tell me our first goal should not be what is the cheapest cable I can possibly buy? Maybe start with the certification and then look for the cheapest cable within that or from a reputable company. Right. Anyway, USB IF spends a lot of time working with some of the major retailers to try to educate them and convince them the benefits of stocking the certified product, right? Right, right. Versus the lesser untested product. By the way, not being certified doesn't mean the product isn't good. It's just there's no real proof, right? Yeah, yeah. Well, we've had Ramon sitting in the sidelines here waiting but he did a spectacular demo when we were at PEPCOM. And hopefully, Ramon, you can explain this for the audio only audience while you're also letting people see it in the video. I'll try at least a minute. And what we're trying to do is to actually demonstrate the things that we just talked about. We've got a laptop from Dell that makes PS13, which has USB 4 built in. And we're connecting to an OWC dock, which has USB 4 as well. Yeah, OWC just came out with that USB 4 dock, right? It just came out with USB 4 dock, yes. And then we have two drives connected. One that connects over PCIe, so just PCIe tunneling. And so USB 4 drive. And then we have a USB 3 drive. So it does USB 3 tunneling over the thing. So now, and then we're also connecting to a 5K display. So we just talked about these three things, which is tunneling PCIe and tunneling USB and tunneling display 1. So we're doing all those three things here. And I'm actually just gonna go ahead and run the video. Unfortunately for you people on audio, you'll have to imagine the video running. So I'm gonna run the video. So I'm now just demonstrating the video is playing. I'll stop running a read and a write to both these drives at the same time. So we're watching a video going on on this 5K, giant 5K display and you're running a disc speed test on both of those discs? On both of those discs at the same time. And as you can see, I mean, when we go on the radio, we actually are moving about 3,000 megabytes per second in reads from the two drives. And we're doing about 2,000 megabytes per second writes on the two drives, while at the same time is playing 5K video. So this is all in USB 4 over a single cable, right? And what I'd like to say, if you've asked about this, how do I know if things just work? I've got another, I buy these things, these are all brand new, they're all USB 4, they all support USB 4. What I'm gonna do is also connect to a Note 20 Ultra, which does not support USB 4, but it has the Type-C connector on it, right? So I'm gonna go ahead and disconnect. So you've just removed the display or the computer from the display. And from the OWC dock, the whole thing. Okay. And I'm gonna go ahead and connect that port. This is using, and it moves to the Samsung DeX mode. As you can see now, this is now showing the display. Now, obviously the Samsung Note cannot drive a 5K display, but it's running 1080p. Okay. It's running USB 2 and DisplayPort Alt mode. But it just automatically, the OWC dock, automatically, the exchange information, figured out that it only does USB and DisplayPort Alt mode, moved to that configuration. And then I also have a mouse here, which I can, it's connected behind the dock. So I go to the mouse and go to my files. We have the dock internal storage. What is this storage? USB storage here. So now you're connecting to those storage drives that are connected through the dock? Yeah, through the phone. To the phone. And as you can see now, I'm playing the same video I was playing before, but now it's playing off of the drive, reading it, and then just laying it out onto the big screen TV. So it's going from the drive through the phone? Through the dock to the phone. The phone is decoding it and then sending it out of the display to over here. Okay. So that's your demonstration of how it's negotiating all of this. And I didn't have to worry my pretty little head about it. Right. And so, you know, yeah, does it support USB, does it support USB 4 or USB 3? All these things, the beauty of USB from the day we started with USB 1, you know, USB 2, and to today is the fact that we support backwards compatibility. Right. And so, as I think Brad mentioned earlier, it will negotiate to the highest capability that it can possibly connect at and then use that capability to communicate with peripherals and other things you're connected to. While at the same time providing power as well. So I'm getting fully charged up as well. And so the phone won't run out of juice because I'm running all this stuff. Yeah. You were powering the notebook earlier as well. Yeah. And I was powering the notebook earlier with the same thing with a much higher rate. It negotiated the power levels that each of these things can handle. And then determines that that's the speed at which it's going to charge the laptop or the phone for that matter. Oh, so this really wrapped this together beautifully. I know that Brad explained it to us in more theoretical terms, but to see it live and actually happening Ramon is fantastic, bringing those two pieces together. This has been great, guys. I really appreciate the time you spent. And I think it's clarified a lot of it for me. And I'm going to be, hopefully, we'll be a little more informed on what we should get and how to explain it to normal people. And I especially like the fact that maybe we don't need to explain it to people because it'll just figure itself out. Yeah, I don't know if you want to. I mean, we should tackle the elephant in the room, which is, of course, how is USB4 and Thunderbolt relate, right? And just to be clear, for those who will obviously see the Intel branding program around what's called Thunderbolt 4, Thunderbolt 4 is USB4. Thunderbolt 4 is USB4. It is USB4. And what Thunderbolt 4 is from Intel's perspective, and again, it's an Intel branding program. It's not a technology per se. All they're really doing is they're trying to help Thunderbolt 3 customers relate to this new move in technology to USB4. So it provides some continuity for those users to go from Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 4. Hopefully, they'll get the 4 is the commonality between USB4 and Thunderbolt 4. But what it also does is Intel is trying to promote like a, you might call it an Uber brand, an Uber level of performance. A Thunderbolt 4 product is intended to support 40 gigabytes per second. It's intended to support all the backward compatibility with Thunderbolt 3. It's designed to support many more displays and things like that. So it's really just setting a very high bar. But a USB4 product that isn't branded as Thunderbolt 4 will work perfectly fine with it, and in fact, could be just as capable. It's just really a choice of branding. So a Thunderbolt 4 device is a USB4 device, but a USB4 device is not necessarily a Thunderbolt 4 device? It can be. It can be, but it isn't necessarily. It'll probably have, they may have made a choice to maybe, maybe it's only 20 gigabits per second. Right, but if it's Thunderbolt 4, it's 40 megabits per second. And still operate at 20 gigabits per second. Sure. Perfectly fine. What were you going to say about the experience? You said megabits and I was saying 40 gigabits per second. Gigabits. Oh, thank you. Yeah, very important distinction. OK, all right. So yeah, no, I had that in my list of questions and I skipped it. I forgot to ask that question. You didn't want to overlook that. Yeah, that was one of my favorite things I wanted to understand because the confusion is there. I do appreciate also that I think it's going to be less confusing going forward than it has been. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And that's something everybody can appreciate. But our favorite thing really is that the connector goes back and forth to be fair, right? You know, it's relatively safe for everybody to just take it and plug it together and see if it works. They're not going to damage anything. And they'll be hopefully mildly surprised. It always does what they had hoped it would do. It might not work on HDMI to display port like you were trying to do. But that's I'm trying to do old technology. So going forward. It's really kind of mixing old and new. But again, if it's old USB, it will always work well with new USB products. Two capabilities of its original intent. Yeah. Perfect. All right, well, I think that's a good place for us to stop. This was fascinating. I think I could talk to you guys all day. Really appreciate Brad and Ramon you coming on. If people want to learn more about what USBIF does, where would they go? Well, the association is usb.org. Oh, there you go. That's easy to remember. That's pretty easy. All right, thank you very much for coming, both of you. Thank you for having us.